On that checklist remark, I'd like to see and use more checklists. Hopefully some smarter person will write the "How to put a Rails app to prod" checklist, now that the need is obvious. Same for Django, or any other popular stack. It would be great if the communities created and maintained checklists summarizing best practices for different tasks.
Once you have a good checklist, you can turn it into a library so that the code can check the things on the checklist for you, or change the code so that the things you had on the checklist to avoid are impossible, and the things you had on the checklist happen automatically. Then you can stop checking the things on that checklist and start on a different checklist.
What you're describing is people doing work that can be automated. That can happen in software, but only in incompetent development teams, or under very special circumstances.
Surgery is different from programming because it's manual labor, and it still exists as a human activity because we don't yet have a feasible way to automate it.
