Because as a huge enterprise you want stability and ability to check the boxes you need to check far more than anything else.

I'm at a medium enterprise and this is true. If I go with e.g. Atlassian I can get everything checked off, even if it's expensive and kinda dogshit. But I know they have a support system, I know they read CVEs and issue patch notes, I know I can find the info for audits and SOC2 cert and everything else.

Oh, some startup offers better software for a tenth the cost? Great. It'll be 30% more work for me to track down all that bullshit? Ok then, complete non-starter, I'll stick with Atlassian.

Yep! We sometimes have a choice between the gold-standard and commonly updated open source solution to X and a two-bit hacked together proprietary solution that has 24/7 support at high cost...and we choose the one with support, because that's what our audits basically require. Because then we can say "yes, it's still within the support contract, we have an escalation point".

That still doesn't seem autonomous in any real way though.

There are people that I could hire in the real world, give $10k (I dunno if that's enough, but you understand what I mean) and say "Do everything necessary to grow 500 bushels of corn by October", and I would have corn in October. There are no AI agents where that's even close to true. When will that be possible?

I mean...fair. All I can say is it's still very critical and in production. I guess it's just worth pointing out that horribly outdated things still need support :)

No joke, it just came up at work as a possible solution to something. We have some legacy systems that talk over TCP in plaintext. It's all within well-secured networks on locked down machines, so fine. But now we want to move things to Megaport, and their agreement says "btw don't put anything in plaintext ever, we guarantee nothing". So stunnel will probably be the fix.