Automation Spine
Intake, triage, draft — the three-step pattern that carries most solo operations, and where it breaks.
Intake: one door
Every automation that failed had more than one way in. Multiple entry points mean multiple states, and state you cannot see is state you cannot fix.
One queue. Everything arrives in the same shape, even if a human has to reshape it on the way in.
Triage: cheap and reversible
Triage should sort, not resolve. The moment a triage step starts doing work, its failure becomes expensive and silent.
Sorting wrongly is recoverable. Acting wrongly usually is not.
Sorting wrongly is recoverable. Acting wrongly usually is not.
Draft: never send
The final step produces a draft, always. The human action is approval, and approval is the thing that keeps the whole flow trustworthy enough to keep running.
Most automations do not die from bad logic. They die because nobody built the error path, so the first unexpected input silently stops the loop.