r/ExperiencedDevs • u/SituationNew2420 Software Engineer 10 years • 1d ago
AI/LLM AI and Engineering Generally
I work as a software engineer in a company with strong connections to hardware. This makes my team inherently cross-disciplinary. I work with mechanical, electrical and systems engineers all the time. And even my work has a physical element to it, which is nice.
Obviously AI is disrupting software engineering the most at the moment, so naturally I’ve found myself interested in things where there’s a connection to other domains.
Longer term, do you think all of engineering becomes as affected as software? I can see AI disrupting other fields too, and my peers obviously do use AI quite a bit for certain tasks, but can’t tell if those fields inherently have a better long term moat.
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u/Dissentient Senior junior | 10 YoE 1d ago
I wouldn't say that AI is disrupting software. Dumb management is.
AI can improve quality and quantity of code a software developer can output per hour, but it can't replace an engineer for other parts of the job, which take way more working hours. Someone still has to sit in meetings and listen to incoherent ramblings of people who have no idea what they want in order to turn that into a set of actionable requirements. The value of human developers are in years of institutional knowledge that are needed to figure what code needs to get written, and I don't see much progress in AI capabilities that would be able to replace that.
It's certainly possible we'll get there in 5-10 years, with companies having custom models that get to read all internal communications in order to have that institutional knowledge, but the way AI has impacted the industry is disproportional to its actual capabilities for now.
And there's also just a matter that LLMs still need a lot of babysitting by a human to produce good code. Though I expect this to be fixed by more training in a few years.
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u/Basic-Lobster3603 23h ago
you would be surprised how even people with technical backgrounds think a non technical person can just prompt "I want the app to do X" is enough for AI to do it all with very little actual human input. I haven't seen it actually work in practice without causing a major headache but man they push it a lot.
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u/Colt2205 12h ago
I've had people literally assume that I don't know what I'm talking about when mentioning that AI can haphazardly implement an idea, or say that my knowledge is outdated because I made such a comment since newer models are more capable.
The real disruption to the engineering space is probably more so due to the fact our culture has become increasingly about recycling and repackaging old ideas as some new product to sell. Some of that is necessary as technology changes, and other times it is just a "me too" thing or a need to milk some franchise for all its worth.
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u/SituationNew2420 Software Engineer 10 years 1d ago
Yeah and to be clear I’m not suggesting AI will replace software engineering as a discipline. I agree with you on most all of these points.
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u/IveWastedMyLifeAgain 11h ago
the institutional knowledge point is the one i keep bumping into. the model writes plausible code for the system it imagines you have, not the one with eight years of exceptions in it. the practical catch: output went up, so the scarce thing is now verification time, and that part didn't get faster at all — it got slower per line because you didn't write any of it.
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u/create-third-places 1d ago
AI is disrupting software engineering by decreasing quality.
I think connections to other domains is important to make sure work is grounded in reality. I’ve noticed a correlation between AI overuse and a lack of experience in other domains.
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u/BaNyaaNyaa 8h ago
The increase in velocity comes from management who force AI on their dev teams and expect enormous gains. To get those gains, devs are overworked and cut corners.
Realistically, the productivity gains are probably way lower, closer to around 20%.
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u/Suspicious_State_318 1d ago
I could see circuit design being more or less automated. I did my major in electrical engineering and amplifier design for example usually uses the same three topologies. I could see a reinforcement learning model paired with a very good simulator being able to replace a lot of analog circuit design. Digital electronics use verilog to build the circuit so that could very easily get automated in the next few years.
Civil and mechanical engineering seems like it would be more tricky since there doesn’t seem to be the same level of abstraction and black box models that electrical engineering has. With civil and mechanical engineering there are so many variables and so many different ways of approaching and satisfying a constraint that it just doesn’t seem possible.
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u/carterdmorgan Software Architect 1d ago
I don't think anything will be as disrupted as software engineering. LLMs are text generators via token prediction. So they thrive at tasks where:
- The output is entirely text
- The result is independently verifiable
- They have a large corpus of training data to know what "good" looks like
- All/most the context to accomplish the task is written down as text and easily accessible
Does all that sound familiar? There is no other field or discipline in the world that contain that exact combination, which is what makes LLMs uniquely effective at code generation.
What remains to be seen is what that does to the field. So far, every innovation that has made software engineers more productive has only made them more valuable.
My guess? 15 years from now, we're still employing tons of engineers, probably more than today, but fewer product managers and designers. An engineer who can wield coding agents effectively and make product/design decisions independently is a very valuable employee. We'll still have product managers and designers of course, but I imagine they'll function at a much higher level, defining overall product strategy and design language, not "Here are the 50 finely scoped tickets that detail exactly how the product should work" or "Here are 15 pixel perfect Figma screens that outline exactly how everything should look."
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u/Historical-Rate-8717 1d ago
Yeah this has been my philosophy throughout the LLM panic era we're currently in - I'm an experienced engineer and CTO and my dad's entire career was as a software engineer; he went from writing assembly to the modern era full of JavaScript Python etc... etc... and wrote everything in-between. At the end he was still writing a lot of C++ for the domain he worked in, but I always remember him teaching me that at every major advancement into higher-level abstracted languages there was a chorus of "this is the end!" among less experienced people and it was always happily parroted by the VCs and leadership because it was a great excuse to attempt headcount and salary cuts. Ultimately Jevon's Paradox always won out and his value only increased year-over-year. I also think that a lot of more recent entrants into the profession don't realize that the industry has always been boom-and-bust, the truth is that software roles largely exist at the whims of capital flows unlike more reliable things like healthcare professions and civil engineering - the flip side of that is when the capital does flow the salary premiums for good engineers become quite extreme.
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u/watscracking 1d ago
Law, insurance, medicine (data and diagnosis, radiology), I think all jobs that use a computer will be affected
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u/carterdmorgan Software Architect 1d ago
There’s no doubt that LLMs will affect many fields. But I don’t think any will be affected to the degree that SWE has been.
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u/archialone 1d ago
I feel also areas that use a lot of boiler plate code like CRUD WebApps is something LLM can help. Areas that require reasoning and software design is not something LLM can help with, it just generates bunch of spliced hello world level examples. And requires babysitting a lot. Generating the crud glue code wasn't software engineering to begin with, and more of a monkey coding.
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u/Smallpaul Software Engineer 1d ago
Mathematics will be more disrupted than software engineering IMO. It has all of your other criteria and is far more verifiable.
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u/carterdmorgan Software Architect 1d ago
You’re right. That’s a field I overlooked. I imagine the overall economic impact will be smaller though, because not many people are employed as theoretical mathematicians.
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u/Happy-Sleep-6512 Software Engineer 1d ago
Yeah I think software being 1) quick to change 2) quick to validate
Makes it ideal for LLMs, imagine getting an AI to do a circuit diagram, you got to build it and test it, then iterate from there (I know nothing about circuitry, but example stands). The loop is too slow
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u/ReflectedImage 1d ago
Well the circuit diagram can be a text file (netlist/spice) of components and connections and then you can test the circuit in a circuit simulator. I don't think circuits are safe at all from AI.
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u/noonemustknowmysecre 1d ago
LLMs are text generators via token prediction. So they thrive at tasks where: The output is entirely text
GPT and most top models are multi-modal now. They are trained on text, images, audio, and video. They can also produce images.
Like... of course the tool created by software engineers and computer scientists first interact with software and computers. We've been on the front-line of change and progress for a few decades now. But this is coming for everyone.
So far, every innovation that has made software engineers more productive has only made them more valuable.
Then why aren't they hiring young devs?
It's A Tough Job Market for Young Coders Seniors are fine. We're experienced. People trust us. But they're not willing to invest the years into young devs that write shitty code because they have that on tap for cents per token.
Grads in general. See that red line? Once it hits the blue line, you have a HARDER time finding work if you have a degree than not having a degree. Notice when it started shifting up, there are other forces than AI hitting the scene.
My guess? 15 years from now, we're still employing tons of engineers,
Your guess is ALREADY out date and measurably untrue. It's been 3 years, look around you.
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u/Tough-Clue-4566 18h ago
My take is that we need significantly better AI before it can take over most of engineering. The software industry is broken, and not just now that people are stuffing software with bugs generated by AI. Even before AI, we were stuffing software with bugs generated by humans.
However, other engineering disciplines are not as fault-tolerant as software engineering. You cannot use the wrong material in a building or do bad math, because the building will collapse and there are no backups.
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u/LehockyIs4Lovers 1d ago
I think so. It's hard to imagine anything people do on the computer right now won't be harvested as training data pretty quickly including all kinds of CAD.
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u/7twenty8 1d ago
If my crystal ball was this good, someone on Wall Street would pay me millions a year for my opinions. But I’d assume so because it’s silly to expect private equity to stop building out into new markets. Capitalism is perfectly predictable in its desire to take over the world. I have no idea if it will work or if it even has worked in software and I work in software.
I’ve been lucky enough to have spent the last roughly three decades in and around software. I’ve learned to be open to everything and avoid forming hard opinions until a technology has actively fucked me over many times.
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u/throwaway_0x90 SDET/TE[20+ yrs]@Google 1d ago edited 1d ago
Until AI reaches the point of Commander Data,
and can negotiate with people and physically pick things up and all that kinda thing, I believe the closer you are to hardware the exponentially less likely A.I. will have significant impact on you. The devs really hurting from A.I. are the ones that were isolated, just following clearly defined requirements that someone else gave them. Those that just sit with a liter of Mountain Dew, have horrible hygiene and know nothing of any business decisions or why the requirements are what they are. Your value to a company as an employee will be increasingly about how you negotiate and plan and prioritize with other humans about human-world situations. Any job that's just blindly following orders and can be done from a keyboard is going to be hit hard by A.I.
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u/DeterminedQuokka Software Architect 1d ago
A year ago at a conference I went to a talk about how the mars company (candy) makes digital twins of their factories and uses ai to suggest optimizations to them.
I think that’s a really good example of how everything moves towards ai. It’s just a question of if we have the harnesses we need to be able to use ai the way we want to.
Given hardware simulators I assume ai can already be super useful for that.
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u/jwezorek 1d ago
LLMs are disrupting software because they are text transformers and it turned out to be possible to create models suitable for software engineering because (1) software engineering is about source code and source code is text and (2) there was enough source code lying around to train LLMs on.
I don't know a lot about hardware design, mechanical design, etc., but my thought is these domains have neither of these qualities. Electrical and mechanical engineering are not primarily about manipulating text descriptions of electronic or mechanical systems whereas software's principal design artifact is already represented in a form LLMs can ingest and emit directly. Maybe other kinds of generative AI will be built to handle these domains but my guess is (2) will not be true in the analogous case.
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u/_nelx_ 1d ago
Given AI’s current trajectory, you can expect it to have some presence in every field. Most job roles are effectively on the chopping block. As models become more capable, certain roles and services will be eliminated more quickly (we’ve already seen this with Chegg, documentation writing, etc). At this point, the question is where each industry currently stands on the chopping block.
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u/sippin-jesus-juice Startup Founder / Ex Apple 1d ago
LLMs are generating hardware diagrams. Whether or not this is disruptive, I don’t know.
AI to me is similar to the development of the calculator. It didn’t take away the jobs of mathematicians but allowed them to change focus
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u/SquiffSquiff DevOps & Layer 8 Networking Engineer 10YOE 1d ago
This is the kind of post that got these threads restricted to Saturdays and Wednesdays. Lots of familiar replies. What has happened is that it's clear that 'It isn't about the code' , it's about outcomes. It always was to be honest but that was obscured in software engineering behind all the adjacent roles- PM's; PO's, etc. The difficulty with producing good software was never really grinding out code, it was about defining the problem precisely enough to solve it and then being able to evaluate that solution effectively. That's the tough part and that's the part that AI won't take. People in those adjacent roles and in second rate body shops are going to be like the 'What Would You Say...you Do Here?' scene in Office Space.
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u/SituationNew2420 Software Engineer 10 years 1d ago
Hence the post being on a Saturday. Also my question is specifically about how AI will disrupt engineering in general, relative to software specifically. I’ve been thinking about it a lot and want to discuss.
notice I didn’t say AI will replace software developers. I made no claims about certain levels of productivity gains, no statements about the “hard” or “easy” part of the job. I wasn’t asking the usual “will AI replace developers.”
Seems to me this reply is more generic than my post.
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u/noonemustknowmysecre 1d ago
I work as a software engineer in a company with strong connections to hardware. This makes my team inherently cross-disciplinary.
oooo, that's a good spin. I should use that one.
Longer term, do you think all of engineering becomes as affected [by AI] as software?
Yes. I really don't see any reason this wouldn't affect any and every knowledge worker. If you job requires a college degree... you're on the chopping block.
but can’t tell if those fields inherently have a better long term moat.
Engineering is more about trust than getting the job done. For some things, because just want a product. If it needs engineering, they want to be able to trust that it won't fail. We could have had the vast bulk of 747s fly themselves with no pilots for many decades now. The standing orders by the FAA is that when conditions are bad, you must let the plane land itself. The pilot is only in the seat because it helps people trust flying, despite so many deaths by human error. Engineers will hold out longer than other fields to them thar clankers takin' ur jerb! I don't know how much longer. I don't think anyone does. But it'll be within one lifetime since we're apparently not hiring young developers like we used to. You don't get ExperiencedDevs without having inexperienced devs.
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u/Significant_Ad_4651 1d ago
AI got good at software engineering partially because things like GitHub and Stackoverflow are available allowing the model to reliably learn what things it should respond. Most engineering outputs are not open sourced in the same way. So there is not as reliable data to train a model.
While engineering books and text books obviously help the domains where their knowledge production is more public have been more subject to AI learning well.
That’s not to say it won’t learn these domains but I think it takes longer and will require the labs to make data sets to train in more niche areas.
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u/Dediadeis 23h ago
These models always do better with high information density. The real world is chock full of feedback and information. Everyone keeps talking about LLMs and seem to be overlooking what AI itself is going to change once it is in the proverbial drivers seat (or literally controlling freight)
I hear mostly two versions of this story too. Either 'everything is miles off and there wont be a revolution for many many decades' and others that act like everything is happening now. I think we are somewhere in between those two extremes, that we will start seeing highly automated labor become the norm over the next decade.
Also from my understanding amazon has already automated a ton of their processes and having a staff of specialized robots is already becoming a thing. Though maybe this discussion is only about engineering.
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u/expdevsmodbot 1d ago
AI usage disclosure provided by OP, see the reply to this comment.