June 18, 2026
Automate all the things... oops
Automating my job away
He tried to make work disappear, and the comments say he just made a new kind of misery
TLDR: A programmer tried automating nearly everything and discovered it replaced old chores with a flood of new annoying busywork. Commenters pounced, arguing the story proved automation can backfire—and roasting the article for being so vague it sparked jokes about sex and AI writing it.
A developer set out to automate every little task after hearing a startup rule of thumb: if you do something more than twice, make a machine do it. At first, it sounded like a productivity dream. But the twist is pure workplace horror-comedy: by removing the obvious chores, he says he ended up with even more annoying "glue" work—the fiddly in-between stuff, constant switching, and silly mistakes that suddenly swallowed his day. In other words, he didn’t escape work. He reshuffled the pain.
And wow, the crowd was not quietly nodding along. The biggest reaction was basically: Wait... this sounds worse? One commenter flat-out said the piece reads like automation made life more miserable, not better. Others were harsher, asking if the article was secretly AI-generated because it felt vague, thin on examples, and missing the juicy part everyone wanted: what exactly got automated, and did it actually save time? That lack of specifics became its own mini-scandal.
Still, not everyone was dunking. One reader chimed in with a more chaotic, go-with-the-flow style: treat tasks as one-offs, let the tool stumble through them, then turn the result into reusable help later. But the thread’s comic relief absolutely stole the show, with one commenter taking the line "don’t do anything three times" in a very adult direction and declaring, "Instructions unclear." Classic internet: one part future-of-work debate, one part roast session, and one part accidental stand-up set.
Key Points
- •The article describes adopting a rule that repeated tasks should be automated after being performed more than twice.
- •The author says increased automation shifted the workday toward leftover glue work and more context switching rather than eliminating laborious effort.
- •The article reports that juggling several agents concurrently led to more small mistakes and workflow friction.
- •The author recommends using Copilot CLI with minimal upfront specification to attempt lightweight automations and then iterating on failures.
- •The article argues that AI agents should create reusable skills, not just standalone scripts, and suggests using prior Copilot logs to find new automation opportunities.