CJ Eller

Don't get me wrong, copy & paste is useful. The question lies in how much of it needs to be done at any given time. After dozens of copy & paste's for an Infrastructure as Code project, my focus drained with each key stroke. Copy & paste turned into copy pasta real quick — a genuine mess.

This raises a benefit of automation that alluded me until this very moment — a script automating copy & paste processes is supposed to prevent human error. Such is the case with Ctrl + V & Ctrl + C. Copy & paste is convenient until it isn't. When it teeters towards disaster, then it's time to take the time to script the process out.

Writing out that automation can bring its own headaches, but I'm finding that I prefer the headache of getting this script right than the headache of causing a kerfuffle in production.