Right. This appears to be an example of modern software engineering principles, or even the notion of basic automation, not having reached climate researchers.

Right. This appears to be an example of modern software engineering principles, or even the notion of basic automation, not having reached climate researchers. I'm not surprised. Electrical engineers, engineers in general, insurance mathematicians, physicists. They write code. System critical code. Code that puts fundamental research, lives, and trillions of dollars at stake. They're very good at keeping track of the complexity. Not always so good at relaying it. They're sometimes legally required to test. Testing sometimes means doing the same manual thing excessively. That happens. Sometimes not. To this day, I can't believe how many extremely smart people write code for a living, but because of their training, they don't think of themselves as "software developers". So they don't read up on what software developers do to not kill themselves. (Of course, #notall...)