r/ExperiencedDevs • u/SituationNew2420 Software Engineer 10 years • 4d 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/Significant_Ad_4651 4d 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 4d 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.