In the early aughts, fresh out of college, one of my first projects was to take semi-structured text from database blobs and convert it to XML. I quickly realized it was not a task to be fully automated, too many edge cases that really required human judgement because the it was only very loosely semi-structured. I turned to sed, awk, and pico. Sed & awk did the 99%, and dumped into pico when it didn't know what to do and I would resolve the issue. Doing it semi-supervised in this way was 100 times faster than doing it all manually, and 10 times faster than full automation, and probably more accurate.

But it was the ability to string together these types of command line tools that made it possible.