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I use this word the way we did when I worked as a PC technician and help desker, where there's a lot of automation but then we sneak a bit of manual labor in to make it actually useful. Like how user accounts would be maintained in the correct state automagically.



I've used it for decades to mean "automatically as if by magic" in the sense of Arthur C Clake's quote: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

To flip this adage around: calling your own tech as performing something "automagically" is tantamount to calling it "sufficiently advanced technology".


automagically: /aw·toh·maj´i·klee/, adv. Automatically, but in a way that, for some reason (typically because it is too complicated, or too ugly, or perhaps even too trivial), the speaker doesn't feel like explaining to you.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/A/automagically.html


Well this interpretation certainly explains some of the reactions that word has gotten in my use of it!


Sorry, I didn't mean to imply disapproval, it was basically an idle thought since I see that replacement pretty commonly




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