ai_engineering

AI is mostly operating around the engineering process rather than fundamentally changing how engineers think and create.

The core of engineering - the creative problem-solving, the intuition about what will work, the ability to frame problems correctly, the judgment calls on tradeoffs - that’s still overwhelmingly human work. AI is basically a better calculator or search tool, not a co-designer in the true sense.

Why engineering itself remains untouched:

  • Conceptual reasoning: Engineers need to understand why something works, not just that it does. AI can optimize parameters but struggles with fundamental conceptual breakthroughs
  • Problem formulation: The hardest part is often figuring out what problem to solve and how to frame it. AI needs the problem pre-defined
  • Physical intuition: Experienced engineers have deep intuition about materials, forces, failure modes - built from years of experience. AI lacks this embodied understanding
  • Creative synthesis: Combining insights from multiple domains, recognizing analogies, making conceptual leaps - these remain distinctly human
  • Context and constraints: Real engineering involves messy, implicit constraints (budgets, politics, manufacturing capabilities, user needs). AI tools work in clean, well-defined spaces

AI is still mostly a “better tool” rather than a thinking partner that understands engineering at a fundamental level. It’s like having a very fast assistant who can run calculations and look things up, but can’t actually brainstorm with you about architectural concepts.

Do you work in engineering? I’m curious what prompted this observation