5 Tips I Learned from Automating Tedious Repetitive Work
It's been about two months since I started automating repetitive tasks with AI at work. I started off clumsily, but now it's running fairly reliably. Here's what I've learned.
1. Start small
- If you try to automate a big task from the start, you'll fail. It worked well to pick one small repetitive task, build a pipeline, verify it, and then expand the scope.
2. Design for failure
- It's really important to add logic that sends a notification when the automation fails. You need to prevent the worst-case scenario where it fails silently and no one notices.
3. Combine a rule engine with AI
- Rather than leaving everything to AI, handling clear-cut rules in code and passing only exceptional cases to AI was better for both performance and cost. It also improves accuracy and response speed.
4. Always document
- Even my own automation scripts become hard to remember after just a month. It's important to leave comments and documents so someone else can take over.
5. Keep a human review step
- Instead of fully unattended operation, having a step where a person checks the final output gives peace of mind and keeps quality stable.
It's not perfect yet, but clearly reducing the time spent on repetitive tasks has freed me up to focus on other things. I hope this helps anyone thinking about starting automation.
3 answers
Yeah, especially the second notification is the most important lol. If it fails silently, you won't even notice.
I've felt the same way when automating something similar before—the rule engine + AI combo is really the answer. At first, I blindly threw everything at AI, but costs just went up and the results were vague, so I ended up scrapping it. And documentation—you can never have enough. After about a month, I often find myself looking at code I wrote and thinking, why did I make it like this?
Well, isn't that taking a rather simplistic view of the work? You need a standardized process to apply anything, whether it's a rules engine or AI, but in the field, there are so many exceptions that adoption costs often just balloon. The notification logic is fine, but if there's no one to handle the alert within two hours, automation can become a poison.