[neetodavid]

I've read on this website about people launching minimum viable products that appear to the customer to be some kind of automated service that in reality are the owner manually satisfying the order.

The software isn't necessarily what the customer values. You can provide a valuable service with 0 LOC

[drbojingle]

What tool makes them, and what's the tool made out of? You go back far enough, someone had to write code for something. You're not wrong though but it sounds like a domain specific thing too. Vending Machine as a service essentially. Still, as long as people are writing code it'll be because there's no choice but to write it for their use case.