I understand that in corporate environments it is common to have programs autogenerate code, and then have humans (in theory) maintain that code. Is this true? Does it work well, or is it a disaster?

As a Unix-style hobbyist programmer, I see that as a bad idea. There's nothing wrong with having programs write code, but I think it should be considered an intermediate step in the building process, not part of your source code. And it should just be automatically updated on a build after you change the code-writing program's input. That seems a lot more maintainable. Am I failing to see something here, or do corporate programmers just use a bad approach?