I did this after seeing this before on HN. There were a few processes that were manual that benefitted from the technique in the article.

Learn from my folly: I even called them “do nothing scripts,” referencing this article. However; I was judged by peers for not writing the full automation versions as they didn’t appreciate the idea of gradual automation (programmer hubris?). Saying “do nothing scripts” in meetings did catch the awkward attention of leadership.

As a description, “do nothing” communicates a lot. As a brand, “do nothing” can use some improvements.

My short prescription of turning “do nothings” into “do some things” into “do all the things” didn’t help. We had some new people join the team and they had fun turning the do nothing scripts into a document. * Sigh *

I still build these type of process description scripts still. I usually don’t advertise them to peers until they do some of the things nowadays.