Is Automation Dead? I'm Starting to Wonder.

A few days ago I got a refund request from a member of The Shortcut. She felt I hadn't honoured my promise to teach automation. And honestly? She had a point.

I sat with that for a while. Because the truth is, I have been teaching automation less. Not because I stopped believing in it, but because the way I solve problems has quietly shifted - and I hadn't brought my community along with me properly. That's on me, and it's a lesson I'll carry forward.

But it also made me ask a bigger question. One I suspect a lot of people in this space are starting to wrestle with.

Is automation becoming redundant?

How I used to build

Not long ago, my answer to almost every business problem involved a workflow. Map the process, identify the repetitive steps, build an automation in Make.com or n8n, connect the tools, test it, ship it.

I built the Service Business Operating System - a collection of plug-and-play automation kits for service businesses - off the back of that thinking. The whole premise was: your business has repetitive tasks, here are systems to handle them for you.

It worked. It still works. But something has shifted in how I approach things.

How I build now

These days, when I hit a problem in my business, my first instinct isn't to build a workflow. It's to build a tool.

Instead of automating a process that exists, I'm asking whether I can replace the process entirely with a purpose-built application. Something that does exactly what I need, nothing more, nothing less - built with AI in days rather than hired out for thousands of pounds.

That's a fundamentally different way of thinking. And it's meant that tools like Make.com have quietly faded from my day-to-day without me ever consciously deciding to use them less.

So is automation dead?

I don't think so. But I do think the answer depends on who you are and where you are in your journey.

For service business owners who haven't yet discovered vibe coding or have no inclination to go down that path, automation platforms still make enormous sense. Make.com, Zapier and n8n are genuinely powerful, relatively accessible and solve real problems. They're not going anywhere for that audience.

But for people who are going deep into building with AI - creating their own tools, their own platforms, their own products - the calculus is changing. When you can build a custom application that solves your exact problem, stitching together off-the-shelf tools starts to feel like the long way round.

What this means for the platforms

This is the part I find genuinely fascinating. Tools like Zapier, Make.com and n8n built their businesses on being the connective tissue between applications. They sit in the middle, routing data and triggering actions. That's valuable when the applications exist and you need them to talk to each other.

But Claude Code's new Routines feature is starting to do something similar - scheduling tasks, reacting to events, running workflows - with Claude at the centre rather than as one of many connected tools. It's early. But the direction is clear.

I think these platforms need to evolve. The question is whether they evolve fast enough, and in the right direction, before the builders who used to rely on them most find they no longer need them.

The honest reflection

I could have managed my own transition better. When you build a community around a set of tools and then your own practice moves on, you owe it to that community to bring them with you - or at least be transparent about where you're going and why.

That refund request stung. But it was a fair one. And it's made me think more carefully about how I talk about what I'm building and why, rather than just quietly evolving and hoping everyone keeps up.

The space is moving fast. Faster than most communities can adapt to. And the honest answer to "is automation dead?" is probably this: not yet, but the reasons to reach for it first are getting fewer.

Curious about building your own tools instead of automating existing processes? Come and join us at Vibe Coding Lab - it's free and we build things together.