The Real Reason To ‘Learn To Code’? Automating Your Life

On the joys of writing scripts that do scut work

Clive Thompson
Debugger
Published in
9 min readMar 31, 2022

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“Robotic arm” by Dan Ruscoe

Last night I automated the tip of my index finger.

I was getting super annoyed by an infinite-scrolling site. I generally hate those: I’m a journalist, and every so often I’m a) doing research that b) requires me to go back several weeks, months or years on c) an…

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Clive Thompson
Debugger

I write 2X a week on tech, science, culture — and how those collide. Writer at NYT mag/Wired; author, “Coders”. @clive@saturation.social clive@clivethompson.net