Last Wednesday at the ING TownHall there was an interesting presentation about reducing toil, a lot of it was around automation. Next day I read this article from Austin and both events reminded me of this XKCD strip.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Austin is a Microsoft engineer and he describes what happened when he took a colleague’s advice to never do anything three times, meaning that any task performed more than twice should immediately be handed over to automation. He assumed he had very little left to automate, since most of his coding work was already delegated to AI agents, and he expected the remaining fragments to be too awkward or too specialized to bother with at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He was, in his own words, very wrong, and the particular way in which he was wrong is far more interesting than a simple story about a productivity gain. He automated all the obvious parts and this gain shifted the work he needs to do. It made visible all the non-parts, what he calls “the glue work that never bothered me before”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When start hardcore automating stuff it may be a rabbit hole \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n\n\n\n https:\/\/austinhenley.com\/blog\/automatingmyjob.html<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n https:\/\/xkcd.com\/1319<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last Wednesday at the ING TownHall there was an interesting presentation about reducing toil, a lot of it was around automation. Next day I read this article from Austin and both events reminded me of this XKCD strip. Austin is … Continue reading ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.giral.do\/wp-en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/automation_2x.png\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n