I spent the last few weeks digging into why one of our automations wasn’t working. Nobody had touched it in years. That was the problem. The TROUBLE with Automations, Set It and Forget It Is a Lie.
When I traced it back, the answer was simple. The platform had changed. The tags and filters the automation depended on had stopped getting applied. The thing kept running. Kept reporting cheerful little metrics. Kept looking healthy. Behind the scenes it was sending a fraction of what it was supposed to, to a fraction of the people who should have received it.
Nobody’s fault, really. That’s the problem.
Automation Is Designed to Disappear
The whole point of automating something is to free yourself from thinking about it. The cost of that freedom is that you also stop noticing when it breaks.
This isn’t just a software thing. The shop floor teaches the same lesson on repeat. The auto press needs its registration checked. Your dryer needs its temperature verified, not assumed. Your screen coater needs emulsion thickness measured, not trusted. RIP profiles drift. Inventory reorder triggers fire on stale data. Time-and-attendance miscalculates overtime because someone changed a policy two years ago and nobody updated the rule.
Every °FAI piece we publish about AI tools has the same warning buried in it: the moment you stop watching a system is the moment it starts drifting. Sometimes the drift is invisible for years. Sometimes it shows up as a customer complaint, a billing error, a missed shipment, a press jam, or a marketing channel that quietly stopped working.
This seems like common sense, but how many of us are actually doing it?
The Rule I’m Taking Away: The TROUBLE with Automations, Set It and Forget It Is a Lie
Any system with “auto” in its name needs a calendar reminder to audit it. Quarterly at minimum. Look at the inputs. Look at the outputs. Make sure they still match what you think the system is doing.
Set it and forget it doesn’t save you time. It just delays the moment you find out something’s been broken for years.
On a personal IK note
This has been affecting the number of subscribers receiving our blog updates. Over the course of the next week or so, you’ll see some blogs re-introducing some of our core writing techniques:
- Fahrenheit AI
- the Throwback Thursdays
- maybe the Misprint Mondays
Just re-introducing our subscribers who have been missing back into our format. Hang in there. It’ll be a little annoying to read something that you already know. Thanks for being a subscriber all this time. I’m glad we were reaching you, and let’s welcome back the rest of the tribe.
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