Lets say you outsource this site, and you send a spec to the developer the spec looks something like this: 1) These 27 actions should only be used by an administrator. 2) All users must register with a valid looking email and choose a username.
Every one of those would still take one line, wouldn't it be simpler to just code the damn thing yourself???
This doesn't make sense as a definition of "grunt work" to me. These are more like business process rules or requirements. And 1 line or 27 lines or 4 lines of code sound actually more efficient to me than the corresponding English, mock-ups, etc. needed to specify the documentation for them.
In other words, it probably takes you much less time to write those lines of code than it would take to describe the required functionality unambiguously to someone living across an ocean from you.
Which means the economics of "OK, outsource the gruntwork!" still make sense.
I have a RoR website which is probably pushing 1,000 lines these days. (1,000 lines in Java will, maybe, get a single page mostly done at the day job.) It blows away my day job in terms of functionality. You want to know what about 800 of those lines look like? Grunt work. (Validation that a user has a name and email address? Takes 1 line... 1 line of grunt work. Verifying that anyone using these 27 actions is an administration? 1 line... of grunt work. Implementing a search function for lost registration keys? Four lines... of grunt work. etc)