You should never try to automate something before that something is already working. You can't optimize something that doesn't exist. It's the equivalent of scaling a company before you even have a product, let alone product-market fit.

I completely agree with you, I'm just surprised how often I see people try to do this. As someone with lots of experience in advanced robotics, people ask for my advice on automating things quite a bit. I always tell them they're approaching the problem wrong, and they never listen until it's too late and usually (because it's often a startup) the company just outright fails.

You are not the first company in the world to try to automate <insert blank>, it just turns out it's roughly 2 orders of magnitude harder than you think it is. No, I will not build a production ready system that involves an unsolved robotics problem with a ~$100k budget.