I've become pretty enthusiastic about checklists.

In case it helps anyone else, I wrote a small tool that helps maintain and execute them:

https://github.com/amboar/checklists/

It's just a shell script wrapped around $EDITOR and git. The intent is to write checklists in the style of github-flavoured markdown. It has some tricks such as envsubst(1) interpolation and embedding little scripts whose execution is captured alongside the execution itself.

Here's an example checklist that's fairly well-worn (though is somewhat dated):

https://gist.githubusercontent.com/amboar/f85449aad09ba22219...

Where checklist entries are commands I just copy/paste them into a shell session. Usually this is in a tmux split with the checklist on one side with a shell on the other.

Could more of it be automated? Perhaps, though when some of the steps fail for various reasons, I find it's easier to recover or repair the situation if I have been invoking them myself sequentially. The embedded script support enables progressive automation where stability of the results is demonstrated over time.