Getting machines to handle boring, repetitive tasks in this way sounds like a super power to non-technical me, but Thompson goes on to explain that he too has learned to get his computer to take over his most mind-numbing tasks. He wrote one script to check for and download his son's homework, another to text him the international news headlines, a third to keep him informed how his book was doing on Amazon.  And here's where things got surprising, for me at least. Thompson insists that learning to create these little helpers is way easier than the code-phobic among us probably imagine.  "Some of the most incredibly useful code often isn't rocket science. It's drop-dead simple scripts like these. This is why it's low-hanging fruit for dabblers and hobbyist coders. Again, I'm the type of hacker who learns just enough -- and no more -- to solve a problem I've got. But that turns out to be more than sufficient to automate a lot of boring things!" he writes.

"For example, I’ve set it up so when a user reports a phishing email, it will go in and scrape all the data we need, check with VirusTotal, URLhaus, and Urlscan, and others, and then present all that information to us in our ticketing system. After just a short period using it, we found it saved us 40 hours of work per week."

Speaking of existing staff, let's be honest: Highly skilled programmers are not abundant, and moreover, they are not cheap. If you've been lucky enough to have found a few diamonds in the rough, you want to reserve them for use in challenging, specialized human tasks