The Automation Paradox

The eternal programmer's dilemma: spend 10 minutes doing a task manually or invest 10 days building an elaborate automation script that you'll use exactly once. The ROI math is catastrophically bad, but the dopamine hit from creating that perfect solution? Priceless. It's like buying a CNC machine to sharpen a pencil—completely irrational yet somehow the most rational choice for our engineering brains. We don't automate tasks because it's efficient; we do it because manually repeating anything feels like digital torture.