Oh absolutely. I just had flashbacks to getting outputs where a raster is completely wacko because the input coordinate systems were not the same and so the grids didn’t line up. It absolutely still has to be supervised closely, much more than a lot of more vanilla programming tasks I’ve experienced.

One thing that helped me a ton was making an adapter between my domain specific datasets/systems and QGIS. So I can watch and examine the intermediate steps and leverage that my brain is still pretty darn good at visual pattern matching.

Ouch! I had a sympathetic shudder at your raster flashback, totally been there. I totally get your visual pattern matching instinct too - spooky cos that's how I do stuff too. Great minds.

For what it's worth, I use duckdb and its spatial stuff as my adapter. Works for my brain and if you force e.g. SQL files for each step, gets there in the same kind of way. Still some sharp edges, mind, but overall working well. And then Claude comes for my maths and I sob.