Some interesting post on 37signals blog. You should be prudent with automation. Altough continuous integration, code generation, unit testing are all some kinds of automation, some things should never be automated. If you’re clearly repeating yourself in a recurent task, then you should honnor the DRY principle and automate, but by making so you kill any possiblity of improvement or innovation in the result by make it predictive and repeatable. All artistic coding, designing, writing should never be automated.
37s also promote the use of a text editor, specially TextMate, rather then an IDE like Visual Studio. By generating the GUI by drag and droping you loose the contact with your code. But in the static typing world, refactoring utilities are kind of usefull. Droping the interface designer is the first thing you should drop. If you’re coding an ASP.NET application with more then 100 LOC, consider switching from WebForms to Castle MonoRail. Still not conviced ? Read this and this.
