[verdverm]

I used to focus on the potential pitfalls and be overly negative. I've come to see that these tradeoffs are situational. After using them myself, I can definitely see upsides that outweigh the downsides

Developers make mistakes too, so there are no guarantees either way. Each of your questions can be asked of handwritten code too

[smrq]

You can ask those questions, but you won't get the same answers.

It's not a question of "is the output always correct". Nothing is so binary in the real world. A well hand-maintained solution will trend further towards correctness as bugs are caught, reported, fixed, regression tested, etc.

Conversely, you could parse an IP address by rolling 4d256 and praying. It, too, will sometimes be correct and sometimes be incorrect. Does that make it an equally valid solution?