| name | automagic-problem-discovery |
| description | Audit a workspace for recurring friction, pick the highest-leverage one, and build the automation that removes it. Use when the user asks "what should I automate", "what's wasting my time", "find the friction in my workflow", wants a self-improvement pass over their own tooling, or runs this on a recurring loop. |
Automagic Problem Discovery
Overview
Most automation gets built for the friction someone noticed. This skill hunts the friction they stopped noticing: the manual step repeated so often it no longer registers as a cost.
One pass. Audit, pick one problem, build the fix, report. The user leaves with a working tool, not a list of suggestions.
Scope
Never read credential stores, private keys, personal communications, or any directory and channel the user excluded. Ask before touching anything ambiguous.
Everything else is fair game: shell history, logs, cron and launchd jobs, scripts, git history, project layout, task runners, CI config.
Step 1: Audit for repetition
Hunt repetition, not complaints. Complaints point at what annoys; repetition points at what costs.
Evidence of friction:
- Commands re-run by hand that a script could own
tmp- scripts, or recovery scaffolding abandoned after something broke- Jobs that fail silently, or report success while failing
- Handoffs where a human retypes what a machine already holds
- The same fix applied in three places
Done when at least five candidate frictions are named, each with the artifact that evidences it.
Step 2: Dig to the leverage point
Run 5 Whys on each candidate, three tiers minimum, then sort each into one of two shapes:
- Symptom: this one job broke. Fixing it fixes one job.
- Leverage: the pattern that let it break silently. Fixing it fixes every job sharing that pattern.
