I'm not sure what I'm talking about, either. :) I have a vague notion that this represents a subcategory of tools, but can't put into precise language yet.

Something like grep doesn't count, because it takes a description and does some actions, and neither does a debugger doesn't count, either, because you don't give it a spec, but instead manually frob the program. But something like tsort would be much closer, because it takes a data file and produces some more data. I guess in a Unixy sense I'm thinking of things that would nearly always called as part of a pipeline, except that in this case a human is part of the pipeline. Maybe.

I need to make a list of tools to say "yes" or "no" to, so that I can determine which properties are common to the classification my brain is using.