“Automated” != “Fully Automated”/“Autonomous” IMO. I took one class on this years ago and didn’t pay a lot of attention so disregard me if I’m super off base, but Silicon does rely heavily on computer aided design, no? I think a more charitable reading of the parent in that light makes it an actually quite insightful comment
I can't think of a single aspect of chipmaking that is not automated to some degree. Manufacturing of semiconductors is probably the most automated thing that humans have ever managed to do in the physical world.
Chip making is in a really sad state of automation. There's lots of money poured into very ingenious products, but the major incumbents have to real incentive to standardize, so you still have some unstructured file formats (SPICE) with different dialects veeery hard to parse correctly, you have ad-hoc APIs depending on vendor and software versions that all try to capture you into their ecosystem, you have half-assed attempts at standards (à la xkcd/927) that you can't rely on.
And this sad state of affairs shows no sign of evolving favorably. Closed-source software and corporate interests at their finest.
Also just the state of highly sophisticated but niche software (ecosystems) in general. It usually winds up super messy and only just put together enough to function for the small number of users.
Somewhat, IMO. For example, did you use spellchecking or autocorrect (where ‘use’ may mean you spent a tiny less time/attention on spelling, trusting your spellchecker to add wiggly lines to words you might misspell, even if you don’t make any typo?)