Toolmaker

Well, he claims it saved him weeks of work. It would probably have been mind-numbingly boring work, too. So he (1) got more done per unit time, thus hopefully having more chance to impress the people who set his salary, and (2) got to work on more interesting things instead of on mind-numbing stuff that a short program could do just as well. Seems OK to me. (If you think no one should ever work on anything that doesn't directly bring them more money when they do it better, why then I think you'd better go looking for an economy in which there are no companies with employees.)

It's a great practice for when you will see pennies of it. It's a great practice for the next contract to say "increased expected productivity by 2x by doing the work in 1/2 the time"

It's also really, really nice when your tools turn into applications.

Satisfaction.