Bad automation speeds bad things up

Bad automation allows you to poke yourself in the eye a lot faster, it is as simple as that. Computers are much faster at executing tasks than us human engineers. If we had the same set of operating procedures executed by a human versus a script, the script would finish faster than humans, sometimes without the benefit of having a solid feedback loop between procedures. The internet is full of horror stories of when someone pressed the Enter key and immediately regretted it.

We need to make sure the chances of bad automation scripts screwing things up are as small as possible. We all make mistakes; carefully test your script before any production work and small blast radius are two keys to making sure you can catch your mistake before it comes back and bites you.