I often write those sorts of tools iteratively.

By the time you’ve done something five times, it’s probably part of your actual process, and you should start treating it as normal instead of exceptional. Even if admitting so feels like a failure.

So I staple something together that works for the exact situation, then start removing the footguns I’m likely to hit, then I start shopping it to other people I see eye to eye with, fix the footguns they run into. Then we start trying to make it into an actual project, and end game is for it to be a mandatory part of our process once the late adopters start to get onboard.

I hate the days when you are trying to fix a bug in a block of code and as you write pinning tests you realize that the code has always been broken and you cannot understand why it ever got the right answer. You’ve let the magic smoke out and you cannot put it back without fixing the problem. At some point you have to stop trying because you understand perfectly well how it should work and you need to move on to other things.