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I also think that the biggest value in doing things manually is that you actually learn. One of my clients used to make a nice curated list of the important fi

I also think that the biggest value in doing things manually is that you actually learn. One of my clients used to make a nice curated list of the important financial and stock market news of the week, it was a niche part of a niche product but people loved it. At some point he thought about automating everything, it became less curated, more spammy, it lost any value and in the end so did the product. Sure there was more news, but it was less curated, edited and the signal to noise ratio got worse. In fact what they did manually was more valuable even if the scope was smaller. Many companies don't understand that and rush into premature optimization. I'll have another example: one of my clients wanted a scraper to automate something his company needed to do manually: check competitors prices on their ecommerces. I built it, way simpler than they wanted (they thought they wanted an app with a proper front end, turns out it was better for both to produce an excel spreadsheet with the data) and they were happy. Then after some time they understood that they were missing part of the experience: navigating their competitors manually allowed them to see new approaches to show the catalogue, new trends and products, they were actually learning from the competition. Eventually they realized and got back to doing it, and left my scraper just for price analysis. But the overwhelming majority of my clients keep putting automation before the product and problem and misses important learning opportunities.

pimlottc 1y ago
People focus on the primary function they want to automate and forget about all the ancillary functions and effects, which, in aggregate, can be as important as the core function.
minnapps 1y ago
That's a really good point, doing things manually is an important part of being connected to a job and its outcomes. I will also say, sometimes you need a few hours of little manual tasks to break up the day between brain-heavy tasks.
drchickensalad 1y ago
This fuels my feelings on why most uses of GenAI are such a step back for society's non-short-term effectiveness.
30minAdayHN 1y ago
Similar thing happens in sales. A gen-AI driven sales tool might write perfect copy and reach 1000 people. But when you go by each person and write a hand-written email to them, the ancillary thing is that you learn about that person. You develop intuition about what sort of people would be right people and develop a perspective about why you can solve their problem or not. This completely gets lost when you automate and play numbers game. This is especially important in zero to one phase.

pimlottc 1y ago

People focus on the primary function they want to automate and forget about all the ancillary functions and effects, which, in aggregate, can be as important as the core function.

minnapps 1y ago

That's a really good point, doing things manually is an important part of being connected to a job and its outcomes. I will also say, sometimes you need a few hours of little manual tasks to break up the day between brain-heavy tasks.

drchickensalad 1y ago

This fuels my feelings on why most uses of GenAI are such a step back for society's non-short-term effectiveness.

30minAdayHN 1y ago

Similar thing happens in sales. A gen-AI driven sales tool might write perfect copy and reach 1000 people. But when you go by each person and write a hand-written email to them, the ancillary thing is that you learn about that person. You develop intuition about what sort of people would be right people and develop a perspective about why you can solve their problem or not. This completely gets lost when you automate and play numbers game. This is especially important in zero to one phase.