Augmentation degrades gracefully. Automation breaks catastrophically.
You chase 'fully automated' workflows. They break because one edge case wasn't accounted for. You spend 6 hours debugging why the automation didn't work.
Steps, decisions, judgment calls — document what's actually happening.
Automate the repetitive parts. Not the judgment parts.
Keep decision-making human-centered.
Catch breaks early. Don't discover them in production.
If the tool fails tomorrow, can you still do it by hand?
Workflows fail. Augmentation degrades gracefully. For environments with compliance, stakeholder, or operational risk, graceful degradation is much cheaper than catastrophic failure.
Automating weekly status reports. Tempting to fully automate. But data formats change; context shifts. Instead: automation pulls data and generates a draft. A human reviews for accuracy and whether the numbers tell the true story. Work drops from 45 to 10 minutes. If it breaks, you still know how.