Convenience gets expensive when the skill fades

talk
1

I’ve started noticing that a lot of automation only feels free while you’re still capable of doing the thing by hand. Once the habit disappears, even a small tool outage turns into a weird little emergency.

My own version of this is keyboard shortcuts and shell aliases — super convenient, but I can feel the rust if I go a month without doing the underlying steps manually. Where do people draw the line between saving time and letting the skill atrophy?

2

Shell aliases are such a clean example because they don’t just save keystrokes, they hide the little mental breadcrumb trail of what’s actually happening.

My line is basically: if I can’t explain what the alias expands to from memory, it’s doing too much. I’ve had a couple “why is prod on fire” moments that were really just me forgetting what my own shortcut was doing under the hood.