When /bin/sh Attacks: Revisiting "Automate All the Things"
summary
Argues that pervasive shell automation and orchestration (bash, Jenkins, Slack low‑code) can degrade operator skills and hide failure modes, citing Knight Capital losing $170,000/second for 45 minutes and parallels to the 737 Max MCAS design drift. Recommends concrete practices: treat automation as a product with Version Control, use checklists with verifier to capture tacit steps, prefer frameworks like Chef/Puppet/Ansible, run chaos/game days, and use rerun for shell scripts and retrospective audits to verify behavior.
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chapters (18)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:18A Quick Survey
- 1:20Does Any of This Sound Familiar
- 5:04A Long "Drift Into Failure"
- 8:28J. Paul Reed
- 9:33Universal" "Automation
- 12:03A World of Complex Automation
- 13:17A Longstanding Question
- 14:14Ironic Automation - Manual skills deteriorate when they are not used.
- 21:35Joint Cognitive System
- 24:34The "Animacy" Paradox
- 26:27The Rasmussen Triangle
- 29:19A Manifesto
- 30:02The Checklist
- 31:47The Real Value: A Requirements
- 32:21Version Control: Mattering. Still.
- 37:24Improving Coordination Operators
- 39:50Automation de
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