I disagree on the junk part: I see it so that if the output of the program are working, the logic must be flawless (just maybe not optimized when it comes to efficiency). Of course in our case the inputs are highly structured and it is easy for humans to spot errors in the output files so this ”iterate until outputs are perfect” has worked great, and yield huge savings in workhours. In our case none of the tools are exposed outside so in very worst case user may just crash the app.

But yeah I agree building any public frontend or anything business critical is likely the way to doom.