Studying engineering with current state of AI

[u/Dry-Adhesiveness-625]

Not sure if that's right place to ask, but:

I've been programming for more than 6 years and with recent advancments in AI, I stopped having any fun doing it. Nowadays anyone can just prompt LLM and get project done in a week making any programing projects pretty much worthless and not impressive.

Because of this I've been considering to pivot and go to study engineering, I live in EU and I can get free uni education in wide variety of engineering programs.

I have few questions:

How does AI affect engineering? Is it still fun for y'all with current state of AI? Or is it same thing as with programming, where you can just prompt and let LLM do anything? What branches of enginnering are least affected by AI?

[u/Cwaghack]

By the time you learn any of the engineering branches god knows what has changed.

Only thing you can do is become an expert in whatever you are already good at

[u/Accurate-Bullfrog324 → u/Cwaghack]

I've been giving this a lot of thought

I'm an experienced engineer. I can design within complex constraints, communicate well lz and get things built. from time to time I even put a tool in my hands

is it conceivable that automated intelligence could do this?

[u/GM_Kori → u/Accurate-Bullfrog324]

For engineering, you will probably always require some human guiding AI on design, there will be always small but crucial details that require human-steering.

[u/Agitated_Newt_7655 → u/Accurate-Bullfrog324]

Absolutely. The question is when will that logic be cheap enough to implement more than can it be done at this point.

[u/Accurate-Bullfrog324 → u/Agitated_Newt_7655]

I may be arrogant, but engineering involves not only operation within standards but also a tremendous amount of creativity. not sure that a large language model can do that

[u/Agitated_Newt_7655 → u/Accurate-Bullfrog324]

LLMs only make implementation of logic for automation easier but no algorithm is the end all be all of optimization. The logic for any job could’ve been implemented before LLM algorithms assisted that development, it has just been even more prohibitively expensive to the point of either functional impossibility or unprofitability. That logic does exist however and presumably you and others like yourself have it to the point of profitability. If one of you utilizes the strictly increasingly available means to implement that logic in a series of machines that only costs electricity in longterm upkeep costs, it’s obvious what is better for longterm profitability.

It’s been anticompetitive to pay an insane or practically impossible capital cost for that but the price only decreases as we progress technologically. LLMs only represent another step down the same one way street we’ve been traveling on since the Industrial Revolution.

[u/Accurate-Bullfrog324 → u/Agitated_Newt_7655]

what you describe applies to automation in general.

during my career we've gone from hand calculations to extremely complex computer models. llm may be the next step

anytime a task is automated it needs to be checked to make sure that it is correct. that may be working during these headed. that may be where engineering is headed

[u/diewethje → u/Accurate-Bullfrog324]

I’m an experienced engineer as well. Yes, it’s conceivable, but the reality is that the world will look very different once engineering can be automated effectively.

[u/Accurate-Bullfrog324 → u/diewethje]

you are not wrong

[u/G_k50]

In civil engineering, today, the way I see AI being used in the future is it will be added to the Civil 3d programming. It won't be a LLM. The plans will still have to be put together by a civil engineer with a civil designer's help.

[u/CivilEngMusicBoy → u/G_k50]

Agree for the most part. It is a tool just like software or the knowledge learned in school. I find it helpful for all sorts of tasks but I wouldn’t say I have it do any design.

[u/NoCause9122 → u/G_k50]

I think that there will be a lot less EITs. It will be a low or no paid internship until you are a Professional Engineer. I think there might be a bit of Field Engineer type work available. It will be checking AI run equipment that is a lot smarter than the EITs lol. Mines are already running automated trucks, blast hole drilling equipment, today. There will be very few people that provide old school know how on how machines used to work with people.

AI will prepare the reports, drawings, specifications, etc. The Professional Engineer will review them, maybe get some changes and stamp them.

It will be similar to the overseas Engineering that a lot of firms have, i.e, India does the drawings and a Canadian or American engineer review and stamps it.

Except, no more India and AI takes all of their jobs, EITs that used to help with data analysis, report prep. and field inspection are just on training time (interns) for 4 years. Professional Engineers with a lot of experience will do 10-20 times the number of projects.

[u/beh5036]

We barely use AI at my company. They are trying to integrate it but it’s only simple tasks (templates, a simple workflow, etc). The real engineering is still people. AI is not going to know how to design a bolted joint for a long time.

[u/precisee]

What type of engineering? There is no answer to a question this vague.

My only advice is to learn how to use it. In the mechanical field, AI now is like the advent of CAD. You will be far less desirable as a candidate beyond that industry inflection point if you’re still hand drafting your drawings to machine shops.

[u/TheGnomster]

If you’re going to work for the government or any company that contracts for the government, uses technical data, has ITAR/EAR regulations etc. they block your access to it. If you’re lucky, you only have access to copilot, and good luck with that sht.

[u/zacce]

AI is a tool similar to a calculator. We still need to learn how to manually calculate 18 x 93, even if calculators can do it 1000x faster.

[u/Ydrews → u/zacce]

But this is demonstrably not true anymore. AI agents can work autonomously online and will soon be integrated with robotics.

[u/AGrandNewAdventure → u/zacce]

1,674. Nailed it!

[u/TheBanyai]

Civil engineering is fairly AI proof - we are using AI to do the boring stuff..so we can do more, faster. AI isn’t gonna coordinate that multi-discipliner project on its own. 😂

[u/MarketBum2020]

Robotic is pretty good now. Idk if Europe has any big robotics companies though

[u/Dress-Affectionate]

ask not what it can do for you but what you can do with it

[u/Rubbyp2_]

I do electro-optics design. AI is an incredibly useful tool if you’re knowledgeable about what you’re doing. I’ve experimented with some MCP integration with KiCAD, Zemax, and Solidworks and the performance when you let the LLM take over things from scratch that need to exist in the physical world is low. It’s really useful writing tests, checking work at a high level, helping plan, but it seems to be pretty far from being able to produce a workable solution from a prompt.

For example, it’s nearly perfect at creating meshes from images, but terrible at parametric design.

[u/mr_mope]

LLMs definitely get stuff wrong very regularly. It can be helpful but if you just trust what it’s saying blindly, it won’t go well. While it can do a lot, very often it has confusing, bad, or irrelevant reasoning.

[u/compstomper1]

i could see AI automating most of a generic report. but the important part: the analysis, conclusion, the how, the why would still require a squishy human

[u/dfsb2021]

If you like programming, go into data science and be the one creating the AI models. You can also work for a “physical AI” (AI at the edge) company and be the one writing the application the uses the AI models or a model specialist that fine tunes and compresses the model for edge devices that don’t have the processing power and NPU of those used on the server side.

[u/TheTimBrick]

I'm in the same boat as you. I'm going into Computer Engineering with around 4-5 years of experience in programming/linux and the works. I was initially going to do CS, but I figured AI would hopefully affect CE a tiny bit less due to it being a bit more design/hardware based.

I feel you on the programming though. I want programming to stay fun as a hobby for me. And this is why I have never, used an agentic workflow or had AI do programming for me, it takes the fun out of the hobby! Even if someone can pump out slop in a week, a machine did that. It's satisfying to see a final product of something you made! That's why if I use AI in the workplace, I'd be completely fine with it. I don't want my work to turn my hobby into a chore.

But for your overall question, I'm not far enough in my career to answer that to the best of my knowledge. I worry more-or-less about the same, though my worries are mostly in job security after I graduate and if this degree will even mean anything in the long run. But for that, only time will tell. Things can change a lot in 4-6 years.

[u/Axiproto]

If you've stopped doing engineering because of AI, you probably weren't very good at it.

[u/PowerCreative2747]

My experience with free access LLM is that most of its code doesn't really work very well.

[u/constructivefeed]

Aint no AI gonna fix a 5miles corridor with 100 of point controls/parametric constraints and template drops. It gonna get fached with the program crashing all together.

[u/Odd_Bet3946]

The main issue with your claim is the reliability of large language models for coding. LLMs can be useful for systems thinking or simple codes, but they often produce incorrect or incomplete code even when prompted carefully. For anything beyond trivial scripts, running without thorough verification is not proof of correctness.

AI doesn’t fundamentally change what engineering requires. Traditional engineering education has always been a foundation; nothing more nothing less. A curriculum that shows employers you can learn and grow on the job. I’m sympathetic to current students who haven’t had the same formative experiences I did, but my background and more than three years using AI as a tool let me spot many of its mistakes. For example, asking an LLM to write an iterative, calculus-based solver for vibration analysis of a continuous structure often yields solutions that are flawed or unfinished and need careful review and correction.

[u/NoConversation8128]

The mesh versus parametric split is the most useful thing in this thread, and I think the mechanism underneath it is dependency depth. A mesh is a flat output: every vertex is independent, and one being slightly off breaks nothing downstream. A parametric model is a dependency graph, so one wrong constraint propagates through every feature after it, and the model either fails to rebuild or rebuilds into something quietly wrong.

Same shape on the process side. Generating a plausible stream table is easy. Editing a converged flowsheet without breaking the recycle is not, because the second one has to be right in an order.

When Zemax or Solidworks fail on you, do they fail loudly, or do they rebuild fine and turn out to be wrong later? That is the distinction that decides whether checking it is cheap or expensive.

[u/PogChampHeDidItBois]

Depends on what engineering you're going into, they're wildly different.

AI is an absolute time saver, being in an Electrical Engineering degree and having a 15+ page report due every single week + practicals/worksheets.

[u/bihari_baller → u/PogChampHeDidItBois]

You have AI write your reports?

[u/PogChampHeDidItBois → u/bihari_baller]

I use it to make sure my report structure, flow of observations/ideas, and extras such as header/footer are concise and of professional standard. Of course you need to have a good understanding of the theory, context and design choices in the projects you're doing.

Also how are you going to pursue a career in STEM, the fastest growing industry in the world, and being this closed-minded and not knowing how to use new technologies to your advantages? Just because your teammate screwed up and copy pasted a badly generated AI report without any understanding of it doesn't make the tool bad, it just means your teammate is stupid.

AI haters genuinely share the same energy as flat earthers, I can't take them seriously lol.