Automating the boring 'grunt work' of software development leads to more ideas from humans but makes those ideas significantly worse.
April 25, 2026
Original Paper
Reshaping Human Interaction in Organizations: How Algorithms Automating Mundane Tasks Impact Humans’ Idea Generation on GitHub
SSRN · 6616418
The Takeaway
CI bots on GitHub that handle mundane tasks are inadvertently killing high-quality innovation. Humans gain their deep domain knowledge by performing the repetitive, boring parts of their jobs. When an algorithm takes over the grunt work, developers lose the foundation needed to generate viable new concepts. The quantity of suggestions goes up, but the quality of those ideas takes a massive hit. This suggests that total automation may be a trap that prevents humans from truly mastering their craft.
From the abstract
Organizations are increasingly adopting algorithms to automate mundane tasks in knowledge work, which prior research has shown to liberate human members to interact and innovate. However, mundane tasks entail a different kind of human interaction essential to the innovation process that algorithms may have displaced. This study investigates how the adoption of algorithms automating mundane tasks reshapes human interaction patterns and impacts idea generation for innovation. We argue that while a