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Comment by mfonda | Hacker News Reader

I'm a big fan of checklists as well; however, working through a checklist is still a manual process with room for human error. I've gone down the road of creating checklists, then realized that many of the items would be much better automated. For example, suppose a list item was "Ensure command X is called with arguments -a, -b, and -c, then command Y is called". This could all be wrapped into a simple script that calls these commands, eliminating the potential for human error. I've found that as I create checklists, they often turn into a list of things I really need to automate.

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Definitely agree — and that's not a knock against checklists.

Externalizing a process that previously existed only in someone's head is a win. Creating a checklist is a straightforward framework for such externalizing, and allows you to separate the question "how do I accomplish my goal?" from the question "how do I express this with code?" (like writing pseudocode before real code).

Whether a process is automated or manual, there's always room for error if the surrounding context changes. When an automated process is annotated _like_ a checklist, I find that I get the best of both worlds: minimal affordance for human error with a clearly described thought process to fall back on in the event of a problem.

(It's also not terribly uncommon to have steps that can't be fully automated, like authenticating to a VPN with 2FA under certain security frameworks...!)

> I'm a big fan of checklists as well; however, working through a checklist is still a manual process with room for human error.

I've had at least one checklist where, by following it religiously, human error was rare - and by paying proper attention, what errors did occur were noticeable and correctable.

Handed off the checklist to someone else (at management's request - it was eating up some of my time) and the human error rate went to nearly 100%. Great guy, good at his main job, just not fastidious about checklist discipline. I ended up creating an incredibly brittle, constantly breaking, broken-as-hell time sinking set of scripts to automate the process on our build servers, because that was less work. Sigh.

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