You're kidding (I think), but I missed a piece.

Part of the point of doing it the second time is to make sure that I really understand what I'm doing and how I'm doing it. Without that, I can't write the automation on the third time.

Well, if the task is "automating things" (for very general values of "things"), I don't understand how I'm doing well enough to automate that.

Why? It's already automated, the question about whether to automate a class of things could be answered by adding a dimension to this: https://xkcd.com/1205/

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