I think the problem is that I've made it seem like a strict rule in the article; "You must disable SSH or everything will go wrong!!!". It's really just about quickly highlighting what needs automating. Like you say, sometimes you just want to diagnose your problems manually, and that's fine, re-enable SSH and dive in. But if you're constantly fixing issues by SSHing in and running commands, that's probably something you can try to automate.

Personally I always had a bad habit of cheating with my automation. I would automate as much as I could, and then just SSH in to fix one little thing now and then. I disabled SSH to force myself to stop cheating, and it worked well for me, so I wanted to share the idea.

Of course, there's always going to be cases where it's simply not feasible to disable it completely. It depends on your application. The ones I've worked on aren't massively complex, so the automation is simpler. I can certainly see how not having SSH access for larger complex systems could become more of a hindrance.

Agreed, but two important notes:

1) Automation doesn't have to be complete automation. I can use Chef tools like knife-ssh to run a single command on every one of our boxes in near-real time. This might not be automated to the extent that the OP is referring but it's 99.8% more efficient than logging into 500 boxes to do it (or 200,000 in Facebook's case). If you can get 99.8% with ease, it may not be worth pre-automating for that final 0.2%.

2) Knowing what is worth automating comes from experience. If I have to do something nasty once, it might be a total waste of time to automate it. There are lots of one-off things I type at a command prompt that are quicker to run than to automate. I think being so dogmatic about automation as to say you should never run things at a command line requires you to spend peple's time non-optimally.