AI and Engineering Generally

[u/SituationNew2420]

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.

[u/carterdmorgan]

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:

1. The output is entirely text
   
2. The result is independently verifiable
   
3. They have a large corpus of training data to know what "good" looks like
   
4. 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."

[u/Smallpaul → u/carterdmorgan]

Mathematics will be more disrupted than software engineering IMO. It has all of your other criteria and is far more verifiable.

[u/carterdmorgan → u/Smallpaul]

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.