Yes, that's kind of what I have in mind.

I'm not sure how the GUI for creating recipes would work. It would probably need to be pretty complex.

I have an idea in my mind where you arange premade blocks on a canvas and connect them with pipes (a patch based UI like Quartz Composer), but I doubt that this would really be the best way to do it.

There's also tasks that are one-off (eg. migrate data from one system to another) and things that need to happen regularly or even continuously.