Done it myself. The fact that you have a long history in the business makes me think we're either talking about wildly different things and this is a mismatch

Done it myself. The fact that you have a long history in the business makes me think we're either talking about wildly different things and this is a mismatch of language and context, or you're deliberately trolling me. It can take a good few years to get to the point that one no longer has to think and understand in a concrete language. There are whole sets of common mistakes that get made across languages and tools. I've fixed errors in Pascal, which I do not read, because the person writing it was clearly thinking in C and made a mistake in their C thinking which they then translated into Pascal. Luckily for me they used common C naming and layout for that piece so I matched the whole thing up to C patterns. Copy paste errors are easier ones to see; cases where replicated code is clearly meant to be different in a few keys places or values, and whoever did it just missed one. Array errors are common, no matter how the array notation works in language du jour. The list goes on. All that aside, we know it's possible because there are machines doing it right now. They are made of stats and patterns. There is nothing else in there.