Then automate those points as and when it's worth doing. Nobody is saying you can't do that, in fact it's a very key selling point of a do nothing script - you can very easily upgrade it to a do something script.

The alternatives are "do everything scripts" which get lost in dealing with how to automatically manage 1password, or documentation which is just a do nothing script that doesn't lead you through the checklist.

I think the point is that it's a psychological hack to just get started. It's making a point, and the point is that it's even helpful without running the commands. Yeah, sure you can immediately make it run the command as soon as it exists -- the article is not implying that that's wrong

You also get to a point that's functional but not optimal very quickly. Improvements can then be added incrementally by different people as and when it's worthwhile.

And often it doesn’t need to be optimal. If the functional process takes 5 minutes and you do it once a month then you can’t spend more than 5 hours optimizing it before you’re going backwards.

https://xkcd.com/1205/

I feel the place where that intuition might have an exception is where you want a culture change, or you want to communicate a culture of "anyone can do this and is encouraged to". Sometimes it makes sense to automate something that doesn't save time, like putting it in a chatbot command that invites others to run it :)

>Fuck cutting and pasting stuff from one terminal into another terminal. This is the point of this approach. To offer incentives to turn into scripts maintenance procedures that come around often but for which there isn't enough budget.

I think jupyter notebooks are better suited to fill this role since you can gradually turn a 100% markdown wiki document into a script and offer one-click execution.