Automation is a 10-part series. Use this page as the table of contents and read the posts in order.

Read the series in order

  1. Automation Is Not One Thing
  2. Deterministic Workflows: When Reliability Matters More Than Intelligence
  3. AI Automation: When Judgment, Language, or Ambiguity Matters
  4. The Automation Boundary: Code vs Model vs Human
  5. Human-in-the-Loop Is a Design Pattern, Not a Failure
  6. State, Idempotency, Retries, and Queues
  7. Observability, Auditability, and Replay
  8. Agents Inside Bounded Workflows
  9. Failure Modes, Security, and Blast Radius
  10. The Automation Architecture Worksheet

Start with Automation Is Not One Thing. If you want the practical diagnostic, jump to The Automation Architecture Worksheet.