Completing a tasks, documenting the problem and what you did to solve it serves as a kind of automation for the future. Anyone can read it and pattern match to the situation before carrying out the sames set of tasks to fix it again. This also ends up becoming research or a spec for how to automate the task programmatically (a higher order form of automation).
See also:
- Automation of even low-level tasks is an example of compounding interest
- Humans are the great interop layer
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Documentation as Customer Success
Self-serve businesses that sell complicated software (like an API) can use documentation as a way of augmenting or replacing customer success. For example, early Stripe did not have sales or support but created outstanding technical documentation that was always available—you didn’t need to schedule a call to discuss implementation or answer questions, you could figure it out yourself.