Nearly any C programmer could write this.
> and would have taken me months to write by hand
That implies humans can write it because I am a human and presumably other humans can too. I was making a statement about it not being possible to write it in any justifiable amount of resources.
My company would fail if I spent months on this, but a week to harden init is for sure worth it.
If a single person can do the full job to full standards in a few months, then the whole idea of it being too annoying for a human to ever do falls apart. That's not that expensive. Your company can't spare you, sure, but most companies could handle that price.
And even with the adjustment to being something it's easy to hire someone for, that's still ballparks away from "in a week for a few dollars". Nearly every coding project is impossible for humans by that standard.
Exactly, which is why this small project, and the other dozen projects that need to be written to the same standards to make the final end result OS, would just simply not happen otherwise.
No small FOSS org can afford to spend person-years holding standards this high, which is why in practice most orgs just cut a ton of corners and pull in tons of dependencies no one will ever review and the attack surface that comes with them.
LLMs allow experienced engineers to get 10x as much done in the same time, and now that this is possible few will be willing to pay engineers to do it at 1x speeds again.
Just like once assemblers became normalized, few orgs would let people write all their assembly by hand anymore except for very small high performance sensitive portions.
Software engineering is not going away. It is just accelerating because we were able to move our attention up a layer again.
Please use very different wording from "impossible" or "can't be done" then. It not being price-competitive is a far weaker claim.
My request for better wording stands. The context was not enough to make things clear.