Everyone is taught at a young age how to do basic addition and multiplication. That's all check out requires. People are not taught at a young age how Rust lifetimes work or how to write human maintainable code.

I agree, as with everything in 2026, the reality lands somewhere in the middle of the discourse online. But pretending this is in practice anything like the check out example is wrong.

The point you seem to be missing is that focusing only on optimization makes us all fragile to system shocks.

> Businesses don’t exercise (or perhaps even train) this process because it’s just not needed enough to warrant the cost.

Until a crisis hits. Covid and supply chain failures. Iran war and straight of Hormuz. Prolonged War in Europe with no production pipeline available. Banks collapsing after unsustainable overleveraging in supposedly "safe" mortgages.

For every optimization and cost-saving measure that is deployed, there should be a backup plan in place. MBA types and "technologists" keep missing this. What is the backup plan for the case where most of the economy activity is built on software produced by business who overleveraged on LLM for code generation?

Though I do believe you are making them in good faith, I find those comparisons do not hold.

CAD still requires you know what to do, and without CAD you can still draw blueprints by hand because you know what the result should be. Checkout is basic arithmetic you can do on a paper or even your personal phone. In both cases it is clear what the process is and what the output should be, and it doesn’t replace knowledge and training and certification.

With coding, none of that is true. By and large, there is a trend of people who don’t know what they’re doing shitting out software, or people who should know better not verifying the very flawed output they get. That is already having negative consequences in people’s lives.