How to automate a process you can't fully describe yet

The standard advice is that fuzzy, undocumented processes aren't ready for automation. That's usually right, but it isn't always practical: sometimes the process lives entirely in one person's head and there's no time to wait for them to document it properly.

The workaround isn't to automate the process; it's to automate the observation of it. Log every decision that person makes for two weeks, with the input that triggered it and the choice they made, before writing a single line of workflow logic.

That log becomes the actual specification. In most cases, patterns emerge fast: 80% of decisions follow three or four consistent rules, and the remaining 20% genuinely need a human. The automation handles the 80% and routes the rest to the person it learned from.

This is slower than automating a documented process, and it should be: you're extracting a process that doesn't exist on paper yet. But it's faster than waiting for someone to write a spec they've never had to write before.