My Mental Model for "Is It Worth Automating?" Has Changed
The article discusses the evolving perspective on automation, particularly with the advent of advanced AI coding agents. It highlights how AI can now effectively automate tasks that were previously time-consuming and inefficient. The author shares personal experiences from game development, illustrating the significant time savings achieved through AI-driven automation.
- ▪The capabilities of AI coding agents have improved significantly since January 2026.
- ▪AI was used to automate playtesting for a game, saving days of manual testing time.
- ▪Automation tasks included syncing Game Center entries and generating gameplay videos, which were previously tedious.
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My Mental Model for “Is It Worth Automating?” Has Changed Disposable scripts suddenly make sense when the implementation cost collapses. Posted on 17 May, 2026 · 11 min read So, to set the backdrop: It's May 2026, and we're all talking about AI, all the time. Well, some of us, anyway. And there was an inflection point in the abilities of coding agents around January 2026, to the point where they are now good enough to be trusted with writing a lot of code. This could be good or bad, depending on your view, and maybe you shouldn't trust AI with your entire codebase yet. Something I haven't seen discussed much is just how useful AI can be outside of your main codebase: we can let AI write code to automate things that previously would have had a terrible work-to-time ratios.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Hermanschaaf.
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