Comment by te_cima
1 year ago
why is this interesting to you? the whole point of doing all of this is to be more efficient in the long run. of course there is an initial setup cost and learning curve after which you will hopefully feel quite efficient with your development environment. you are making it sound like it is not worth the effort because you have to potentially spend time learning "it"? i do not believe that it takes long to "learning" it, but of course it can differ a lot from person to person. your remarks seem like non-issues to me.
It's interesting because there's a significant chance one wastes more time tinkering around with custom scripts than saving in the long run. See https://xkcd.com/1205/
For example. The "saves 5 seconds task that I do once a month" from the blog post. Hopefully the author did not spend more than 5 minutes writing said script and maintaining it, or they're losing time in the long run.
Maybe, but
1. even if it costs more time, it could also save more annoyance which could be a benefit
2. by publishing the scripts, anyone else who comes across them can use them and save time without the initial cost. similarly, making and sharing these can encourage others to share their own scripts, some of which the author could save time with
In my experience, it's not "maybe" but "almost certainly" which is why I stopped doing this. Every time I get a new system I would have to set everything up again, it's not cross platform, doesn't work when using someone else's computer, suddenly breaks for some reason or another, or you forget it exists...
The annoyance of all these factors for outweighs the benefits, in my experience. It's just that the scripts feel good at first and the annoyance doesn't come until later and eventually you abandon them.
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Sometimes, you explore to have ideas. By fixing a few problems like these, you learn about technologies that can help you in another situation.
Not all time is created equally though, so I disagree with that xkcd.
If something is time sensitive it is worth spending a disproportionate amount of time to speed things up at some later time. For example if you’re debugging something live, in a live presentation, working on something with a tight deadline etc.
Also you don’t necessarily know how often you’ll do something anyways.
> I disagree with that xkcd
The xkcd doesn't seem to be pushing an agenda, just providing a lookup table. Time spent vs time saved is factual.
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I find that now with AI, you can make scripts very quickly, reducing the time to write them by a lot. There is still some time needed for prompting and testing but still.
One thing which is often ignored in these discussions is the experience you gain. The time you “wasted” on your previous scripts by taking longer to write them compounds in time saved in the future because you can now write more complex tasks faster.
The problem is, to really internalize that benefit, one would need to have an open mind to trying things out, and many folks seem to resist that. Oh well, more brain connections for me I suppose.
Because some of them OP said they use a few times a year. This means they'll probably use it like 150 times in their life. If it saves a minute each time, but it takes 5 hours to create it and 5 hours to maintain it over the years, then it's not really a win.