Yes, but the lack of reasoning behind the implementation means that the new person has to reverse engineer it (practically speaking). This isn't always bad, but

Yes, but the lack of reasoning behind the implementation means that the new person has to reverse engineer it (practically speaking). This isn't always bad, but in most cases it is. My point was that by simply automating the process you don't institutionalize the knowledge as much as you move at least part of the problem somewhere else. It heavily depends on the application, though. In my domain the implementation is rarely self-documenting, and most of the system's complexity is usually baked into the spec or the human part of the process. In some other domains the proportion is completely different.