Announced today

Amazon to Cut 16,000 Corporate Positions to Trim Bureaucracy Boost Bonus for Executives
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-cut-16-000-corporate-122006515.html

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(Bloomberg) -- Amazon.com Inc. is cutting 16,000 corporate jobs worldwide in an effort to remove layers of bureaucracy and "increase ownership," becoming the latest company to target managers for layoffs in recent years.

The tech firm will offer US-based employees 90 days to search for a new role internally, as well as severance and other transition support, Beth Galetti, Amazon's senior vice president of people experience and technology said Wednesday in a blog post.

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Also announced, Amazon will file for 100000000000000 H1Bs as we need skills from India that we cannot find in the United States.

BigRobSA said:

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Infinity: "Everyone should invest, invest, invest....it's how you get rich!"


Also Infinity: "Corporate activities are horrible, we need govt to come in and save the day against evil companies!"

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Right.
I have been investing for 27 years, of which the first 15 were mediocre years where I tried various strategies. The last 12 have been kick ass and I consider myself "rich" today.

You got a problem with that? :-) You should be proud of me man. Also, no debt. Own my 750k house, just bought a 2025 loaded Audi Q7 paying all cash. Paid my son's 4 years of college myself with no loan. No outside help from government or family. In fact I sent $20000 to a family member 4 years ago for pay for their medical costs. Years ago, I paid for my own grad school myself (before my investing succeeded). Seriously, you should be very proud of what a fellow Ag has achieved.

But that does not change things that corporates are horrible. Corps are a reality today and we have to live with them. They are almost all evil and too powerful.

That said, why should I starve? I make money off corps. Satya Nadella and Andy Jassy work for ME. H1Bs work for ME.

I talk about H1B because while I get rich, our kids will lose their futures. That is the only reason for this grift to stop.
men
If you love your kids, join the movement.

hahahha what clowns.

Amazon inadvertently confirms layoffs in email sent to employees; sends 'Canceled' email to employees in cloud unit AWS
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/amazon-mistakenly-sends-canceled-layoffs-email-to-employees-in-cloud-unit-aws-with-notes-from/articleshow/127701992.cms

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Amazon has confirmed that it is laying off around 16,000 people. Hours before the confirmation, the retail giant mistakenly sent an internal email to employees in its cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services (AWS), referring to organizational changes and impacted staff, before the message was marked as "canceled." The email added to uncertainty inside the company as Amazon prepares for another round of job cuts across its corporate workforce, including AWS and its retail operations. The message, seen by CNBC, appeared to acknowledge changes already underway, even as the company has not formally announced new layoffs. Amazon did not immediately comment on the email or clarify why it was sent in error.

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What the email said
The email was sent by Colleen Aubrey, senior vice president of applied AI solutions at AWS. In the message, Aubrey wrote, "Changes like this are hard on everyone," adding that the decisions were being made to position AWS for the future. The email also referred to a post by Amazon's chief human resources officer, Beth Galetti, and stated that the company had notified "impacted colleagues in our organization."The subject line of the email mentioned "Project Dawn," and the message showed a "canceled" tag, suggesting it may have been recalled after being sent.
Amazon has not explained what Project Dawn refers to or why the email was distributed to staff.

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infinity ag said:

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What the email said
The email was sent by Colleen Aubrey, senior vice president of applied AI solutions at AWS. In the message, Aubrey wrote, "Changes like this are hard on everyone," adding that the decisions were being made to position AWS for the future. The email also referred to a post by Amazon's chief human resources officer, Beth Galetti, and stated that the company had notified "impacted colleagues in our organization."The subject line of the email mentioned "Project Dawn," and the message showed a "canceled" tag, suggesting it may have been recalled after being sent.
Amazon has not explained what Project Dawn refers to or why the email was distributed to staff.

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LOL

So, like most companies, the higher-ups aren't very intelligent. How are you a "Senior Vice President" of an IT division and can't freaking email?

BigRobSA said:

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infinity ag said:

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Quote:

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What the email said
The email was sent by Colleen Aubrey, senior vice president of applied AI solutions at AWS. In the message, Aubrey wrote, "Changes like this are hard on everyone," adding that the decisions were being made to position AWS for the future. The email also referred to a post by Amazon's chief human resources officer, Beth Galetti, and stated that the company had notified "impacted colleagues in our organization."The subject line of the email mentioned "Project Dawn," and the message showed a "canceled" tag, suggesting it may have been recalled after being sent.
Amazon has not explained what Project Dawn refers to or why the email was distributed to staff.

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LOL

So, like most companies, the higher-ups aren't very intelligent. How are you a "Senior Vice President" of an IT division and can't freaking email?

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See?
This is what happens when rich powerful men allowed women out of the kitchen and go from making sammiches to sending corp layoff emails.

(I kid)

On a serious note, it is DEI.

Colleen's Linkedin.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/colleen-aubrey-b90816/details/education/

Do you see anything remotely techy in her education? Engineering?? But she is "senior vice president of applied AI solutions at AWS"

This thread delivers.

CEO hate, H1B hate, and bragging on his new infinity all checked on my bingo board. I did not have "hate CEOs or I don't love my kids" on the board though. I'll get that added.

I generally hope my CEO's bonus exceeds his target so I may have to have a talk with my kids about why I hate them so much.

"delivers"

Get it?

Now people are openly taunting Mega CEOs on Linkedin.
People are fed up.

Jassy even looked at Ingrid's profile.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ingridjohnson_when-microsoft-laid-off-18000-of-my-friends-share-7422384582437597185-EtAW/

IIIHorn said:

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"delivers"

Get it?

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Ugh.
Yes dad, we get it.

Shouldn't be a surprise they've hired a lot of H1B visa holders in California over the past year, I guess.

Amazon had over 13,000 H-1B visas approved last year alone. https://t.co/eOXfj0FvMD pic.twitter.com/QVaGShxIjb

— Christian Heiens 🏛 (@ChristianHeiens) January 28, 2026

BigRobSA said:

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infinity ag said:

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What the email said
The email was sent by Colleen Aubrey, senior vice president of applied AI solutions at AWS. In the message, Aubrey wrote, "Changes like this are hard on everyone," adding that the decisions were being made to position AWS for the future. The email also referred to a post by Amazon's chief human resources officer, Beth Galetti, and stated that the company had notified "impacted colleagues in our organization."The subject line of the email mentioned "Project Dawn," and the message showed a "canceled" tag, suggesting it may have been recalled after being sent.
Amazon has not explained what Project Dawn refers to or why the email was distributed to staff.

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LOL

So, like most companies, the higher-ups aren't very intelligent. How are you a "Senior Vice President" of an IT division and can't freaking email?

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This kind of stuff happens all the time in big companies. I can't tell you how many times big org announcements got sent too early, or to one group before another, or the wrong group, etc. I can say it happened almost every single time to some degree at my old corp job.

And it was always maddening when a corporate headcount or promotion directive went out and then immediately a few golden child departments or leaders broke the edict and hired and promoted anyway with zero regard to need while the rest of us had actual good business cases for adding or promoting headcount and could do nothing.

Man, I do not miss corporate.

I'll say it again on Amazon....Look past the AI surface level excuse. Jassy admitted deeper in the reasoning that their corporate headcount is a bureaucratic nightmare and there is no way it's not. They have 1.6M employees. They hired 800k in a mere two years. All of these cuts are in corporate including HR. Those 13k H1Bs are all IT which I'm not excusing because they could find 13k unemployed American IT workers if they wanted to, but these cuts are likely needed and they aren't even a rounding error against total headcount.

On blind, I read of sad situations where a woman said she is due to deliver a baby in 2 weeks and got laid off. Then one person in his 30s has final stage cancer and he got laid off.

I don't know if they are H1Bs or not, but either way it is a sad thing. I hope something works out for the best.

YouBet said:

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BigRobSA said:

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infinity ag said:

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Quote:

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What the email said
The email was sent by Colleen Aubrey, senior vice president of applied AI solutions at AWS. In the message, Aubrey wrote, "Changes like this are hard on everyone," adding that the decisions were being made to position AWS for the future. The email also referred to a post by Amazon's chief human resources officer, Beth Galetti, and stated that the company had notified "impacted colleagues in our organization."The subject line of the email mentioned "Project Dawn," and the message showed a "canceled" tag, suggesting it may have been recalled after being sent.
Amazon has not explained what Project Dawn refers to or why the email was distributed to staff.

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LOL

So, like most companies, the higher-ups aren't very intelligent. How are you a "Senior Vice President" of an IT division and can't freaking email?

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This kind of stuff happens all the time in big companies. I can't tell you how many times big org announcements got sent too early, or to one group before another, or the wrong group, etc. I can say it happened almost every single time to some degree at my old corp job.

And it was always maddening when a corporate headcount or promotion directive went out and then immediately a few golden child departments or leaders broke the edict and hired and promoted anyway with zero regard to need while the rest of us had actual good business cases for adding or promoting headcount and could do nothing.

Man, I do not miss corporate.

I'll say it again on Amazon....Look past the AI surface level excuse. Jassy admitted deeper in the reasoning that their corporate headcount is a bureaucratic nightmare and there is no way it's not. They have 1.6M employees. They hired 800k in a mere two years. All of these cuts are in corporate including HR. Those 13k H1Bs are all IT which I'm not excusing because they could find 13k unemployed American IT workers if they wanted to, but these cuts are likely needed and they aren't even a rounding error against total headcount.

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Well he's been CEO for 4+ years now. HE hired them all. He got greedy and he pulled the trigger on the hires. Now he is claiming they all need to get fired. All this while he files for 10000 H1Bs.
When is he taking the responsibility for these decisions?

Fire Jassy the Gassy.

Of course this won't happen because in corp America, everyone helps each other out at the highest levels.

I'm not disagreeing with that but their reality right now is that they are likely way, way overstaffed. Happens quite frequently in big companies although Amazon is obviously an extreme outlier considering their headcount numbers and their outsized influence and impact to and by the Covid era.

I went through many hiring surges followed immediately by hiring freezes followed by letting attrition work its way through the org for a while followed by a hiring surge followed by hiring freeze, etc etc.

Pretty cyclical.

YouBet said:

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I'm not disagreeing with that but their reality right now is that they are likely way, way overstaffed. Happens quite frequently in big companies although Amazon is obviously an extreme outlier considering their headcount numbers and their outsized influence and impact to and by the Covid era.

I went through many hiring surges followed immediately by hiring freezes followed by letting attrition work its way through the org for a while followed by a hiring surge followed by hiring freeze, etc etc.

Pretty cyclical.

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I agree with you. If it was just him and his employees suffering, I wouldn't care. The problem is when they use the resources of this country and want to hire overseas which harms this country long term. Not acceptable. That is it (as far as my complaint goes).

Layoff everyone, I don't GAF. Give C levels eleventy billion dollars bonus, don't care.
But no H1Bs. Offshoring? Go ahead, pay the tax of 50%.
If not, as a US citizen, I am getting cheated and that is not right.

That is what I am asking for.

Most of the layoffs I've seen at the companies I've worked for could have been minimized by not over-hiring in the first place. After that, choosing who to lay off is generally a disaster and people who are needed are let go and people who aren't stay on.

Any "rankings" are a total crapshoot as well. Often the smartest people are put on the most difficult assignments, so on paper they may not appear to be great performers. Less skilled people working easy assignments might appear to be great performers. Then you have middle management who might be easy performance evaluators or tough performance evaluators. You might have someone in middle management who sees talented people as a threat to their own career trajectory and acts as a sabatour. Etc, etc.

Amazon layoffs: 16,000 jobs to be cut in latest anti-bureaucracy push

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Earlier this week, the company shuttered its Fresh and Go grocery chains after years of experimentation.

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I haven't checked my Amazon Fresh down the street in a while...Stopped going when they took away full automation of the shopping process...It was the only place i could grocery shop for a few items 2X faster than grabbing a snickers at a Walgreens. They removed their only competitive advantage. dumb.

USAA just laid off a ton of people on the banking side yesterday. I frequently check the WARN website and didn't see anything posted, but "insiders" say they got around it by giving their laid off employees 90 days before they are actually no longer employed.

My father worked at USAA his entire career. He finally decided to go ahead and retire when they started offshoring a lot of their jobs to India. He saw the writing on the wall and that was over 20 years ago. Can't imagine how much worse it's gotten then with both offshoring AND H1B hiring. Sad to see a once great company just continue to falter.

Scruffy said:

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IIIHorn said:

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"delivers"

Get it?

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Ugh.
Yes dad, we get it.

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My first choice was the lightenupfrancis gif

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then with both offshoring AND H1B hiring. Sad to see a once great company COUNTRY just continue to falter.

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UPS right behind them with 30,000 layoffs, and Dow came out today laying off 4,500

infinity ag said:

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Baseball Is Life said:

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Sims said:

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Back when Jack Welch did this every. single. year. he was a genius to many.

Sometimes people just don't work out and it's healthy to have some amount of turnover.

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Yes, Rank and Yank is good in principle. You're not always going to hire the top performers, so you need to cull the bottom and keep re-hiring. There is some nuance to this, but it does work and isn't evil. It's basically the anti DEI, as it's all performance based.

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Explain to me how Welch's system works in this situation.

Team A: 10 members. Geniuses. IQ ranges from 200 to 150. Working on cutting edge AI/ML
Team B: 10 members. Average. IQ ranges from 110 to 80. Working on maintenance and manual stuff.

Super CEO Jack Welch decides to stack rank them and cull the lower 20%.

What do you think happens?

Team A: He lays off 2 people with IQs 160 and 160.
Team B: He lays off 2 people with IQs 90 and 80.

I would love to hear your comments about this approach which is how Jack Welch's method worked. Is this the right approach? Any improvements you propose? Would you keep this method if you ran the company?

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There's a lot of companies in Tech that don't use this system anymore for this exact reason. While your example is extreme, there are often cases where you end up pissing off some pretty decent, albeit not exceptional developers.

This is going to be the biggest story in the American workforce for the next decade. We've got to get a handle on AI and figure out how to make lives better and not worse.

AJ02 said:

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USAA just laid off a ton of people on the banking side yesterday. I frequently check the WARN website and didn't see anything posted, but "insiders" say they got around it by giving their laid off employees 90 days before they are actually no longer employed.

My father worked at USAA his entire career. He finally decided to go ahead and retire when they started offshoring a lot of their jobs to India. He saw the writing on the wall and that was over 20 years ago. Can't imagine how much worse it's gotten then with both offshoring AND H1B hiring. Sad to see a once great company just continue to falter.

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USAA also has just as many contractors as they do full time employees. A company does not have an obligation to report contractor layoffs, I don't believe.

I'll also add, as someone with first hand knowledge, the
Amazon layoffs were not as strategic as "cut the bottom 10%". I started with Amazon mid last year. I was caught in the October "first round" of these layoffs. No hard feelings, I knew it was a possibility from the day I accepted the job because I would be joining a subsidiary that was being fully absorbed by AMZ.

Pretty much my entire department was cut, including my Exec. They kept a couple of junior folks to help with transition. I'm assuming those they kept in Oct may have been hit in this second wave once AMZ had the knowledge transfer.

A lot of very talented and committed employees were let go. I stick by my belief that companies absolutely should do what is best for the company and the shareholders, but there are a lot of people and families impacted who did not "deserve" this based on their personal performance.

This is the first time in a 25+ year career that I have been let go by an organization. It doesn't feel great, but they took care of us package wise.

deddog said:

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infinity ag said:

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Baseball Is Life said:

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Sims said:

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Back when Jack Welch did this every. single. year. he was a genius to many.

Sometimes people just don't work out and it's healthy to have some amount of turnover.

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Yes, Rank and Yank is good in principle. You're not always going to hire the top performers, so you need to cull the bottom and keep re-hiring. There is some nuance to this, but it does work and isn't evil. It's basically the anti DEI, as it's all performance based.

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Explain to me how Welch's system works in this situation.

Team A: 10 members. Geniuses. IQ ranges from 200 to 150. Working on cutting edge AI/ML
Team B: 10 members. Average. IQ ranges from 110 to 80. Working on maintenance and manual stuff.

Super CEO Jack Welch decides to stack rank them and cull the lower 20%.

What do you think happens?

Team A: He lays off 2 people with IQs 160 and 160.
Team B: He lays off 2 people with IQs 90 and 80.

I would love to hear your comments about this approach which is how Jack Welch's method worked. Is this the right approach? Any improvements you propose? Would you keep this method if you ran the company?

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There's a lot of companies in Tech that don't use this system anymore for this exact reason. While your example is extreme, there are often cases where you end up pissing off some pretty decent, albeit not exceptional developers.

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Most don't now because Jack Welch has been proven to be an idiot. What I demonstrated above is exactly Welch's method, to stack rank them by TEAM (not company) and fire the lower 'x'%. So in a genius team, he got rid of the "lower" ranked geniuses. Who was ranked them? Their boss who likely felt threatened, so highly likely he ranked the top geniuses at the bottom to get them culled. In Team B, you have doofuses keeping their jobs. So how is this a good method?

When we have stupid and psychopathic CEOs like Welch treated like gods in this country, what hope do we have? Many companies blindly copied it hoping to be the next GE, just like many later, tried to copy Steve Jobs in his turtleneck and brash behavior.

$40mil for the Melania movie. Have to lift up a few more couch cushions i guess

In theory, I don't see an issue with companies cutting loose the deadwood on a periodic basis, if they are doing it objectively and at the right level. The best way to do that is to look at it company-wide and come up with your cut line there and then do it. Doing this at the team level is absurd for the very reasons already posted.

Assumptions:

1. Everyone is getting an objective performance appraisal using the same standards. There will absolutely be holes here (missing PA's) and many leaders are scared ****less to grade their own people appropriately so this assumption is very shaky to even get this done right in the first place.

2. You have a system that is storing all of this and can report this out. This should not be an issue for any big company that is competent. Granted, you are dependent on your HR department to report this out correctly and since HR departments house the dumbest people in corporate American this might be a challenge to get reported correctly even though the capability is present.

Conversely, doing a voluntary leave package to cut costs is stupid because your top performers and/or people who are financially secure enough will be the first ones to opt out because they are the most employable and in demand. This leaves the company stuck with the inferior, unemployable dead weight which is who they should have been pushing out. Thus, you've diluted the talent base of your company.

Sweeping layoffs?

replacing janitors with Roombas?

Chicago PMI released today: 54 (expected 44)

first positive GROWTH in manufacturing in TWENTY SIX MONTHS of prior declines.

so somehow the manufacturing sector is growing

LMCane said:

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Chicago PMI released today: 54 (expected 44)

first positive GROWTH in manufacturing in TWENTY SIX MONTHS of prior declines.

so somehow the manufacturing sector is growing

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It's called the Poe Dameron Initiative.

Go back to sleep America, everything is under control, AI is not going to displace you.

LMCane said:

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Chicago PMI released today: 54 (expected 44)

first positive GROWTH in manufacturing in TWENTY SIX MONTHS of prior declines.

so somehow the manufacturing sector is growing

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Manufacturing productivity levels have been increasing steadily in 2024 and 2025 even with contracting PMI.

It will be interesting to see how quickly productivity accelerates given expansion in manufacturing PMI.

Products and services fail (Amazon fire phone, Microsoft hololens), forecasted growth doesn't materialize, restructures reveal duplicate jobs... You need to layoff people when these happen. That said, AI really is coming for a lot of current white collar work, and it's happening sooner than later. If you have a pro subscription to one of the frontier models and put real some work into designing your AI workflows (eg create reusable markdown files to define analysis structure and rules, JSON schemas to consistently format output), these models will do phenomenal work. Also, software generation is getting really, really good, so we're not far off from a point where an LLM can generate on-demand code to handle your bespoke needs.