My Mental Model for "Is It Worth Automating?" Has Changed
The article discusses the evolving perspective on automation, particularly with the advent of advanced AI coding agents. It highlights how AI can now effectively automate tasks that were previously time-consuming and inefficient. The author shares personal experiences from game development, illustrating the significant time savings achieved through AI-driven automation.
- ▪The capabilities of AI coding agents have improved significantly since January 2026.
- ▪AI was used to automate playtesting for a game, saving days of manual testing time.
- ▪Automation tasks included syncing Game Center entries and generating gameplay videos, which were previously tedious.
Hacker News (Newest) files mainly under programming. We currently carry 5,306 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Hermanschaaf |
| Canonical URL | https://hermanschaaf.com/the-is-it-worth-automating-mental-model-has-changed/ |
| Publication time | Thu, 21 May 2026 11:37:21 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-21T11:51:11.072Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-21T11:51:11.072Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | _5yeHOvyW2jS |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
My Mental Model for “Is It Worth Automating?” Has Changed Disposable scripts suddenly make sense when the implementation cost collapses. Posted on 17 May, 2026 · 11 min read So, to set the backdrop: It's May 2026, and we're all talking about AI, all the time. Well, some of us, anyway. And there was an inflection point in the abilities of coding agents around January 2026, to the point where they are now good enough to be trusted with writing a lot of code. This could be good or bad, depending on your view, and maybe you shouldn't trust AI with your entire codebase yet. Something I haven't seen discussed much is just how useful AI can be outside of your main codebase: we can let AI write code to automate things that previously would have had a terrible work-to-time ratios.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Hermanschaaf.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from Hermanschaaf
