What if the "solution" was actually the problem? For months I'd been building complex CI/CD pipelines with 15+ stages, auto-scaling groups that scaled themselves into oblivion, and infrastructure that needed a PhD to debug. My on-call rotation was hell. Every deployment? A nail-biter. One typo and staging was toast for hours. The team spent more time fixing automation than actually shipping code. Then our intern asked, "Why don't we just deploy manually for now and automate the painful parts later?" I had to admit they were right. We stripped out 80% of the automation. Kept the essential monitoring. Suddenly we were shipping twice as fast with zero downtime. Sometimes the best DevOps move is knowing when to leave things alone.