at my first games job, junior on a cinematics team, I was assigned a manually repetitive four day task

I decided to spend two days looking for ways to automate it and ended up cobbling together a MAXScript solution that handled most of it leaving me with half a day of work to do

I felt clever, but I also felt really guilty, since I hadn't cleared this with anyone and didn't have a plan if my idea had failed, I just really didn't want to do the task manually

I then got assigned the task again, along with condolences

didn't feel guilty anymore

anyway, automation is great

these days I don't even hesitate to write a tool for one time tasks as long as I suspect making the tool will take the same or less time as doing the thing