I'm smiling now, because scripting AutoCAD and writing AutoLisp is a minor part of my job that I enjoy doing. This activity is somewhat frowned upon, but I justify it by saying that automating any design process results in fewer mistakes and faster throughput.
Many years ago, I got called in to a job interview for a position as a Design Automation Engineer. I was just out of school (but I had a great deal of design experience already), so they thought I'd be a good fit. However, I decided that I wanted to do the actual design work and not support engineers who did the design work. In retrospect, I wish I had taken that job. Once you do a few designs, it gets tedious, monotonous, etc. But finding a way to automate a part of the process is like designing once and not having to do it again. Plus, there's more human interaction. Since then, I've looked for jobs just like this, but I've never seen one advertised anywhere.
Forcing myself to invent something.... I'm sort of doing that now. But I find myself coming up with new ways to do other things instead, and I wish I could focus more on those ideas rather than the thing I'm supposed to invent. Well, the Scanner Daybook is a great "device" for recording those "distracting" ideas. I'm working with PTFE now, an interesting substance. I'm trying to convince people that it's not reasonable to expect an assembly that contains PTFE to behave linearly over temperature because PTFE undergoes a phase change at 19C and otherwise responds nonlinearly WRT temperature. They just don't get it.
