It is still largely automatic. Some amount of special annotations are needed in all these related approaches. For example, in this article, @CompilationFinal is

It is still largely automatic. Some amount of special annotations are needed in all these related approaches. For example, in this article, @CompilationFinal is used in Graal interpreters. (It is possible more annotations are needed in PyPy than Graal, but still, an annotated interpreter is far, far simpler than writing an optimizing JIT!)