Automating my job away | Hacker News Reader

Automating my job away

austinhenley.com

28 pointsazhenley23 comments

Was this written by AI? This is just "I automated some things, use skills instead of scripts". Like, what did you automate? How much time did you save? How can I reproduce that?

I too found the article lacking, however I also feel we should have a new HN guideline to not talk about whether or not something was written by AI. It’s rather tiresome, and in this case probably wrong (AIs hate leaving things incomplete).

It’s a useful signal. As the web becomes more full of noise. I am not interested in having my time wasted reading an article that the purported author couldn’t even be bothered to write. If there is a new guideline, I’d propose that it be to not submit AI-generated content.

There is already an HN guideline against submitting AI-generated text.

> Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans.

I think it's fair to discuss whether a post violates the guidelines. I guess it would also be okay to flag in that case?

I think OP was rather suggesting that we have a guideline to avoid comments about whether something was written by AI or not.

Without fail, every comment section will have posts by people talking about how something is AI generated. Yeah we get it. It used to be novel to spot this, but now most people are pretty good at spotting it too and/or don't care.

It's about as meaningful as noting an article is written in English.

Well, my bad. I won't ask dumb questions like "was this written by AI".

HN should have an AI flag for posts. I find the AI content is far more tiresome then people pointing out its AI.

> This article was not written by AI.

It seems content-free, at least at first glance, but I don't get LLM vibes from it.

This reads like it made things worse:

> There was an unexpected consequence: By automating the laborious parts of my work, I had, in turn, filled my day with more laborious parts.

> A menial task that took me 5 minutes once or twice a day turned into a menial task that I was doing 10-20 times a day. As I had automated the obvious parts, it left behind the glue work that never bothered me before. Now it was a substantial part of my day, and the context switching was killing me.

I assume that’s not the whole story, but I would have liked to read about the ways it made things better, too.

It seems the author left in a hurry because he had a lot of new laborious and menial tasks to attend to. :)

He means that he's working 10 times faster so the manual things that he does once per task have to be done 10 times, and so he starts automating those too. I'm not claiming that he's actually 10x faster, just explaining.

But it kind of fits my experience too. Less time coding, and more time gathering requirements, testing, and doing knowledge transfer etc. Then you start thinking about how to make those parts automatic via automated tests or automated documentation generation that you review etc.

> don't do anything three times." If they have to do something more than twice, they should automate it.

What if my partner has a high libido? Instructions unclear.

Idk, call me crazy but I've never had the urge to automate many things. I'm not sure if I've found myself in a situation where I don't have very many things in my life which can be automated, or if I've subconsciously positioned myself where this is the case. Perhaps the most I've done is use LLM's to automate some of the drudgery of coding, but that's not very special.

Like thinking about my life, I could definitely do with a personal assistant to manage the non-work parts of my life, but all the programming related stuff I do, are things I need to do. Maybe I'm just not agentic enough, I can't relate to this article.

I just approach everything as a one off task. Fresh context.

"Use this CLI tool and figure it out. Look up this sentry issue using it"

"Add a service that watches for an error in the log. Look at the home assistant MCP data and find my phone, send a notification to it and make it send when there's an error"

Now after it manually does it and makes the code. "Make this into a skill for anytime I paste a URL with sentry inside the message"

But also important: "make that procedure a prompt file so when I invoke it I just pass X after it and it works fully"

Having too many skills for things that are very specific where you can directly invoke it via slash command, wastes context space with the skill headers I find. So I make those prompts instead

Lemme give you more signal than this how to automate yourself.

1. Write down everything you do in text. Don't skip any details: thoughts, why, how, who, what, and so on

2. Add details. More details. Even more details.

3. You will see some patterns. This is algorithm.

4. Extract algorithms into specs/intent graph. But for god's sake don't use markdown as final substrate. At least write BDD/Gherkin.

5. "Sufficiently structured problem becomes the solution"

You're welcome.

Once I did all of that for what I'm doing (I'm just a web dev...), it turned into a rabbit hole so deep I am now questioning reality itself

I'm not kidding though.

I had a mental breakdown multiple times throughout 2 months while I was "writing down in minuscule detail what I'm doing".

I debugged my brain and realized I have OCD (in addition to ADHD) and it made me so happy that I'm now free from this terrible mistake of not making any mistakes at all.

And I never felt so productive in my entire life.

Incredible things will just start happening once you start writing your thoughts.

It doesn't even matter what you are writing. Just write it all down.

All of it.

>All of it.

Even this?

Well, don't automate your thinking ;)

If you can do this then yes we'll transition to AGI/ASI.

But thinking (and understanding) is still largely human.

If you live in the terminal and do everything via CLIs, it becomes even more obvious what steps you need to automate this stuff.

Unfortunately, a lot of developers are terrified of the CLI for some reason and cling to GUIs and TUIs.

GUI is just sequence of events (mouseclicks, scrolls, keypresses) on top of semantic tree (if we can call div class soup as "semantics"). But we can record it since long time ago and simply compress/remove noise.

TUI is better since it usually operates on keyboard, it's good for visualizing 1d/2d data (which is most of GUIs btw).

CLI is least interactive of them all I'd say and it limits what you can do. Either you have a solved problem that you can trigger with a button push, or you have to input tons of flags to configure behavior, or write a config file and re-use it. To me this seems sub-optimal. I'd rather use voice activation + NLP to let LLM figure out what I want to do, present me with a quick "are you sure? + exact CLI command" and then I can press it.

Forgive me for lengthy text, I was just thinking outloud whether my assumptions about TUI/CLI make sense.

Do you agree?

Haven't seen xkcds being shared in a while, but here's the obligatory xkcd for whether it's worth the time (even prompting takes time):

https://xkcd.com/1205/

What? Am I missing something? I was expecting more of a story... As it stands the article doesn't really convey any information.

> I was talking to a friend who runs a startup and he said that he tells his team, "don't do anything three times." If they have to do something more than twice, they should automate it.

"anything"?

So if human pilot(s) are repeatedly flying commercial planes, that should be fully automated (with no pilots, captains or safety crew on board)?

We are talking fully automated and to automate anything from cars to trucks. The mistakes [0] become so expensive that it will almost bankrupt any startup.

> Try it yourself: Anytime you need to do something more than twice, spend the minimal time possible asking Copilot CLI to automate it.

I stopped reading when I saw this and it is clear that the author is trying to sell you Copilot, which almost no-one uses.

[0] https://futurism.com/advanced-transport/waymo-recall-floodwa...

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