I don't think programming by rote is actually possible past a relatively low threshold. Code is relatively delicate, so just "add strings to files; invoke" is not going to work for most strings.

It's note by rote, per se, so much as it's adaptive pattern matching.

I wonder if "sensors" tend to work more in legacy code. no matter what I need to do at work, something similar probably exists already in the code somewhere. first step is almost always to find that similar code, copy-paste, and tweak it until it works. if you try to get too creative, you get bitten by some weird edge case that would have been handled if you just followed the pattern.