[Cyranix]

Definitely agree — and that's not a knock against checklists.

Externalizing a process that previously existed only in someone's head is a win. Creating a checklist is a straightforward framework for such externalizing, and allows you to separate the question "how do I accomplish my goal?" from the question "how do I express this with code?" (like writing pseudocode before real code).

Whether a process is automated or manual, there's always room for error if the surrounding context changes. When an automated process is annotated _like_ a checklist, I find that I get the best of both worlds: minimal affordance for human error with a clearly described thought process to fall back on in the event of a problem.

(It's also not terribly uncommon to have steps that can't be fully automated, like authenticating to a VPN with 2FA under certain security frameworks...!)