Ten copies by hand

Mid-sprint, I needed the mosaic pattern applied to the turbines and went looking for the elegant way: shortcuts, procedural tricks, the “right” Blender technique. Julia watched me struggle and said the quiet thing: it’s ten turbines. Copy it ten times by hand ▸ 23:51.

She was right, and her framing deserves the archive:

“A veces lo mejor es hacer el básico bien hecho. Las cosas manuales a veces tienen su valorcito.” Sometimes the best move is the basics, done well. Manual work has its little value. ▸ 24:32

The breakeven math

Automation is an investment: you pay a fixed cost (learning the technique, writing the script) to make each repetition cheap. The investment only returns above some N. My N was ten; the fixed cost was an unknown amount of tutorial archaeology under a deadline. Copy-paste won by a mile.

My honest counterweight, also on the record: had it been a thousand turbines, or had I already owned the skill, the clever way wins, and attempting it wasn’t stupid, because the payoff if it landed was large ▸ 25:07. The sin isn’t trying the lever; it’s not timeboxing the attempt.

¿cuántas veces lo vas a repetir? →

The rule we kept

Before automating anything, ask two numbers: how many repetitions, and what does the machinery cost to acquire today, at your current skill, under your current deadline. Below the breakeven, the unglamorous manual pass is not a defeat. It’s the fastest tool in the box wearing a disguise…