what actually trips people up most when going from manual QA to automation

been working with a few clients lately who are trying to make this shift and the pattern I keep seeing isn't really about the tools. it's the maintenance side that hits hardest. you spend weeks getting a test suite running, then the UI changes and suddenly half your locators are broken. one client described it as spending more time fixing tests than actually catching bugs, which kind of defeats the point. and honestly with AI-driven test generation picking up a lot of steam right now, that problem isn't going away, if anything it's getting more interesting because you're also dealing with flaky AI outputs on top of the usual brittleness. the other thing that comes up a lot is figuring out what's even worth automating in the first place. not everything that can be automated should be, and manual testers who are new to this often try to automate too much too fast. the teams I've seen handle it best usually started with a small, stable suite like, core regression flows and built from there rather than trying to replace everything at once. jumping straight into full coverage before your pipeline is solid is a recipe for a bloated suite nobody wants to touch. curious if others have hit the same wall or found a way through it that actually stuck, especially if you've, been experimenting with any of the newer codeless or AI-assisted tools and whether that changed the maintenance story at all.