[vkjv]

I can think of a few benefits, even if it takes longer: you may need to do something similar again and now you have the script, you've gained experience and you might right the next script faster, correctness.

I think correctness is the most important one. Even if a manual task is quick, ensuring that you do it correctly and exactly the same way for all 30-50 things is extremely tedious. If one out of those 50 subdomains was behaving differently and you needed to investigate exactly why, that could quickly erode any time savings.

[jessaustin]

Correctness is huge. The other day a colleague and I were figuring out some things about scheduled work days over the next few years. After I had futzed about in a spreadsheet for five minutes, he said "this is ridiculous!" and started furiously paging through a paper calendar. We had our results nearly simultaneously, but he was off by over a month. After that we just used the spreadsheet.

[hectormalot]

Correctness also works the other way around. We needed to link to databases with non-matching customer IDs, the analyst on the team spent several hours automating fuzzy matching of customer names in R before we concluded it was easier and more correct to build a mapping table by hand for the few 100 that didn’t match.