We love to automate things we barely understand. I’ve seen it in every team I’ve worked with — the moment an app runs on someone’s laptop, the next conversation is, “Let’s set up CI/CD.” Jenkins, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD — whatever’s shiny at the moment. It feels like progress. But most of the time, it’s premature optimization disguised as productivity.
If you’ve never deployed your app by hand, you don’t deserve automation yet. Harsh? Maybe. But true.
Because until you’ve felt the friction of deployment — the SSH into your server, the environment variables you forgot to set, the database migration that didn’t run, the static files that didn’t refresh — you have no idea what you’re automating. You’re just encoding mystery and hope into your YAML.
Every good pipeline starts as a manual ritual.
You push code.
You build it.
You ship it.
You see what breaks.
You fix it.
You repeat.
Somewhere along the way, you start noticing patterns. “I always forget this one step.” “This command takes too long.” “This config should be parameterized.” That’s when automation makes sense — when it saves you from known pain, not imagined complexity.
A lot of engineers treat automation as a status symbol. If it’s not fully automated, it’s “not professional.” But automation without understanding is just faster failure. A broken pipeline that hides its steps is worse than no pipeline at all. At least with manual deploys, you see what’s happening.
When you deploy by hand, you learn how your system breathes. You watch logs scroll. You wait for the container to restart. You notice how long migrations take. You catch subtle things — an environment variable typo, a port binding issue, a permissions error — things that a pipeline will fail silently on, leaving you staring at a red ❌ with no clue why.
It’s like driving a stick shift before an automatic — once you’ve done it, you understand the gears. You feel the engine. Later, when the system drives itself, you’ll still know when something’s off.
I’ve seen teams automate their deploys too early and then spend weeks debugging the automation instead of the app. They ship to staging, something breaks, and nobody knows which part of the pipeline did it. It’s a house of cards built on blind trust.
Manual deploys are humbling. They slow you down — in a good way. They expose weak spots. And they give you confidence that you can recover when things go sideways. That’s the foundation you want before you bring in CI/CD.
Once you’ve done it manually a few times, automation becomes obvious. You’ll know which parts to script, which to leave flexible, and which deserve a human eye. That’s when your pipeline becomes a force multiplier instead of a black box.
So before you open GitHub Actions, before you write your first .yaml, do it yourself. SSH into the box. Run the commands(Or run kubectl/helm. Pick your poison). Watch the logs. Feel the pain. Because once you understand it deeply, you’ll automate with empathy — not arrogance. And that’s the kind of automation that lasts.