[PeterisP]

It's especially relevant when thinking not at the level of computer systems but business systems - since for many tasks you anyway have a combined computer+people process that works for some goal, and there's a tradeoff between computers and people for choosing the level of automation you want.

For exmaple, in your example of a one-time export it might also make sense to write code that does not meet all requirements and explicitly can not handle certain edge cases, if it's more effective to fix these cases manually than try to automate that.