We have to be careful about saying a task is “not toil because it needs human judgment.” We need to think carefully about whether the nature of the task intrinsically requires human judgment and cannot be addressed by better design. For example, one could build (and some have built) a service that alerts its SREs several times a day, where each alert requires a complex response involving plenty of human judgment. Such a service is poorly designed, with unnecessary complexity. The system needs to be simplified and rebuilt to either eliminate the underlying failure conditions or deal with these
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