A lot of automation feels harmless until you realize it was doing the repetition that kept the skill from getting rusty. I notice this most with little admin tasks — once the tool handles them for a few months, I’m slower the one time I need to do it by hand.
Maybe the real question is which parts of a workflow are doing useful practice, not just busywork. Has anyone found a line there that actually holds up?
In ops I’m happy to automate the button-pressing, but I get twitchy when we automate away the “figure out what’s actually happening” reps. If nobody’s eyeballed raw logs/metrics in months, the first weird incident turns into a group therapy session instead of a diagnosis.
The line that’s held up for me is: automate execution, but force a little manual recon on a schedule (even just a monthly “read-only” drill where you trace one service end-to-end). Otherwise you find out at 3am that the only person who knew where the bodies are buried left two quarters ago.
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