I like automating things.
Probably too much.
If a task repeats twice, some little manager in my brain starts looking for a script, a queue, a checklist, or a tiny software intern with a clipboard.
This is useful. It is also how you wake up one day and realize the intern has confidence.
Confidence is where the trouble starts.
One of my agents once drafted resume bullets that sounded clean enough to wear dress shoes. Nice verbs. Good rhythm. Very adult.
The problem was that some of the claims had wandered away from reality. Not wildly. Worse. Politely.
A broken script is annoying. A polished false sentence under my name is a different problem. That is not a formatting bug. That is a me problem with better punctuation.
Another time, two agents wrote to the same queue file and one task vanished. No crash. No dramatic smoke. Just gone.
Asking software to "please be careful" is adorable and useless.
Another run quietly burned about $100 per day on embeddings before I noticed. Very focused. Very expensive. The cloud does not care that I am frugal.
And one task once yelled task.picked_up for almost an hour while doing nothing useful. It had gym selfie energy. Lots of activity. No progress.
So my rule is simple now.
Automate the boring stuff. Collection. Formatting. Search. Checks. Summaries. The work that should not require a human soul.
Gate anything with a bill, a send button, a deploy button, or my name on it.
Keep the weird stuff human: taste, tone, promises, relationships, final judgment, and anything where future me might ask, "who approved this nonsense?"
That is not anti-automation. It is how I get to use more of it without letting it quietly become my boss.
Let the system carry boxes. Let it sort piles. Let it make first drafts ugly enough to fix. Let it remind me. Let it check what my tired brain missed.
But I still want a hand on the wheel when the thing can embarrass me, charge me, misrepresent me, or sound like a LinkedIn post that escaped a lab.
Maybe that is the whole lesson.
Do not automate everything. Automate enough that the human part has room to be human.
Also put spending limits on the interns. Trust me.