Other than the well-established peptide and nucleotide syntheses, laboratory-scale synthesis of complicated products is still mainly performed manually. A recent report from Cronin and coworkers 131 showcased an effcient automation of multistep synthesis and purification processes by developing the "Chemputer" (FIG. ). By using programming, various synthetic procedures were abstracted from written protocols, translated into machine language, and implemented on synthetic modules to prepare pharmaceutical compounds, and can be as or more efficient than a traditional iterative lab approach, without any human intervention. Further, their Chemputer was specifically designed to be amenable to variations in the sequence of steps performed, to allow adaptation to a wide array of chemical processes. In addition, such a synthetic platform allows for the standardization of chemical synthesis, minimizing irreproducibility caused by the synthetic nuances that are often omitted or assumed already known by the reader. As demonstrated by their work, careful design of a one pass multistep system by automation poses great benefits over traditional iterative synthesis that can be time and material costly and wasteful, as well as irreproducible. Lastly, we envision that the development of spatial and/or temporally controlled catalytic systems will be amenable to operation in an automated system, further improving the efficiency of one pass multistep systems over iterative analogues.