# Automate to Think Jan 26, 2025 Most people get automation backwards. They see it as a way to do more things, faster. But that misses the deeper insight: automation is a tool for understanding. When you automate something, you're forced to understand it completely. You can't hand-wave away the edge cases or rely on human judgement to fill the gaps. The act of automation reveals the true nature of the process - its essential patterns, its hidden complexities, its actual requirements. This is why automation often fails in organisations. They try to automate processes they don't fully understand. They optimise for efficiency before understanding effectiveness. They build complex systems to handle edge cases instead of questioning why those edge cases exist. The real power of automation isn't in saving time - it's in forcing clarity. When I automate security analysis pipelines, I'm not just making the process faster. I'm creating a precise model of what "analysis" actually means. Each edge case I handle reveals something about the nature of security threats. Each optimisation exposes patterns in how attacks manifest. This clarity compounds. Infrastructure automation reveals patterns in system behaviour. ML pipeline automation exposes data flow dynamics. Security automation illuminates threat patterns. Each domain becomes a lens for understanding the others. The best automation comes from a kind of productive laziness. Not the avoidance kind, but the kind that makes you ask "why am I doing this at all?" It's a form of intellectual compression - taking complex processes and reducing them to their essential components. This is why the "automate everything" mindset fails. Some processes shouldn't be automated - they should be eliminated. Others shouldn't be automated yet - they need to be understood first. The value isn't in the automation itself, but in the understanding it forces. Pay attention to what resists automation. That resistance is telling you something important about the nature of the work. Sometimes it means the process is too complex. Sometimes it means it's unnecessary. Sometimes it means you don't understand it well enough yet.