Shipping reliable automation tools is mostly about reducing repeated manual work. In this post I walk through a practical pattern I use to build and ship a focused utility: HackerNews Job Auditor . The goal is simple: solve one painful workflow with a script a developer can run locally in minutes. What problem this script solves Most teams lose time in repetitive steps that are easy to automate but expensive to keep doing manually. For this project, I focused on the parts that usually burn time: setup friction, inconsistent output, and no clear handoff artifact. The approach is: Make one script handle the core workflow. Keep output deterministic and readable. Package it with a README and sample output so anyone can run it quickly. Minimal runnable structure from pathlib import Path def run_workflow ( input_path : str ) -> dict : text = Path ( input_path ). read_text ( encoding = " utf-8 " ) lines = [ ln . strip () for ln in text . splitlines () if ln .…