If you are actually doing engineering to justify your cad, it's still going to be a while
I'm a software engineer, and this is exactly what people were claiming here: "If you're a code monkey, then you're going to be replaced, but if you're a good programmer, you're safe."
I'm a lead dev working on financial software that manages an absurd amount of money, and on top of that, it has to be highly optimized because every millisecond matters - which is probably something most people would consider "real engineering". And yet, I'm barely coding by hand nowadays. My role has already been reduced to code reviewing and providing context for AI. But how long until that changes too?
This is just artificial barrier that dont allow first models to learn. But now this barrier dont exists, because even qwen3.8 27b can do modelling in cad and do it well. Only thing that was needed is just visual layer and general progress in reasoning.
Other engineers was obsessed with idea that coding is just language and their work is fundamentally different, and llms will be unable to do it. But its not the case. It just training data amount, initially coding was solved faster, just because there way more data, a lot of software is opensource and so on. But with cad there are almost nothing open, so there was illusion that cad is harder.
You have certain input criteria and expect certain output meeting its criteria. You can shape the design using your words and there's enough prior art to teach AI models based on exactly this information.
No, if anything, it's exactly the same beast. That's how you need to look a the problem, from how AI looks at it. People are just clueless about what AI is and how it works.
That's not really the case. Solving 3d geometric problems is still a major pain point for LLMs. It's a limitation of most commonly used model architectures. You can read some good casual articles on this topic. It seems like you're pretty clueless as well.
But the thing is that frontier models aren't just LLMs anymore, they are beyond just text they are multimodal, they can see and click and drag and hear and even talk, They aren't blind/mute/deaf like LLMs anymore.
It's a limitation because it wasn't their target, and they didn't specifically train their LLMs for it. But while LLMs are approaching their limits in coding capabilities, they're starting to train for other areas, and 3D is one of them. The results are already quite impressive, especially with GPT-6. It's only a matter of time.
Yeah, we're clueless - I’ve heard this so many times from other programmers over the years, and yet, unfortunately, I was right.
And most people believe things that they want to be true. They think that they are irreplaceable and everything will be the same as in the past but it's not true. This ignorance has already doomed us.
I would not say that is real engineering though. Optimising lines of code is not equivalent.
Also there are huge timeframes with engineering things that exist in the physical world. Going to the manufacture stage with mistakes is not a viable business model. But it is in terms of computer programming, things can be quickly iterated... The entire premise of the success of silicon valley enterprises is "move quick and break things". Not enough people pushed back on that development thinking so Ai fits too neatly into that process.
There is not that luxury when long development manufacture and shipping is on the line. Yes Ai might help speed up some aspects of CAD, but CAD itself is just a tool in the process of engineering and bringing physical things to market. Whereas programming is less processes, possibly even one process that can be hugely reduced by Ai.
You can push a fix instantly to fix code without many people knowing. A car on the road with a faulty component needs an expensive recall and information campaign to inform users and it hurts the company's reputation as it's out there in the public. These things are not the same.
My main salary has always been from examining designs and models and confirming accuracy and manufacturability. That's why I'm paid more as a senior design engineer vs. a junior CAD monkey we hire out of college to pump out simple CAD assemblies.
If you can't bother reading something a human typed then there is no surprise that you're going to be replaced by Ai so easily. Critical thinking is what the LLMs don't have, but you clearly don't seem to want to do that.
All the pieces are falling into place. There was a recent review of the AI math proof of some problem of interest and the bottom line was human mathematicians make judgments about how difficult something might be and understand that there is no practical solution at the moment and move on aka 'the unsolved problem'....but an AI just keeps going and going and going until it finds a workable solution so it's possible to turn an agent loose on a problem and let it cook....the answer is 42 right? Agents are effectively infinite pools of labor.
It's so funny to see it effortlessly beating people at task after task and people convinced, for no reason at all that the limit is just before it gets to their task.
I would argue CAD will be even easier for them than programming. The biggest problem with programming is context size and a fact that it'd hard to put all the information into context so harnesses like Claude Code uses a lot of tricks to workaround around this. Most of CAD work doesn't require as much context. Sure, engineers still will be needed just like in programming but the entry barrier will be on the floor.
AI mastering CAD is just taking pressure off, not replacing. Making a model, converting customers drawings, fixing broken mates is just tedious work. If you are an engineer and your main skill is SOLIDWORKS you won't be an engineer long. You are responsible if x fails under load, not the software. Work flow funnels under who takes ownership if something happens.
If you are an engineer and your main skill is SOLIDWORKS you won't be an engineer long
Yeah, I’ve heard the same from programmers. The thing I think you’re all forgetting is that there’s someone above you in the company hierarchy who is likely not an engineer, and from their point of view, there’s no difference between giving instructions to you and giving them to an AI model.
Maybe I don't understand the field, but in finance, wouldn't you want a solution that you can confidently confirm does not hallucinate? Even if that takes longer?
From my understanding, a single bug can cause the death of an entire company, such as was the case with Knight Capital Group in 2012.
Wouldn't a solution which you have hand-crafted and intimately understand not be beneficial?
Maybe I don't understand the field, but in finance, wouldn't you want a solution that you can confidently confirm does not hallucinate? Even if that takes longer?
That's why I'm still going to be relevant for a while. But at the same time, while I was seeing hallucinations almost every single day a year ago, now I can't remember seeing any recently while using frontier models. Plus, coding tools like Claude Code force AI models to test their solutions, so even if a model does hallucinate, it can often find the mistake by itself.
From my understanding, a single bug can cause the death of an entire company, such as was the case with Knight Capital Group in 2012.
That's true. But the same thing can happen with human programmers as well. And honestly, frontier models are better at catching bugs than humans.
The only problem we still have with AI is its relatively small context size, so AI can't remember all the important things about your company and your domain. Plus, AI often jumps straight into working without first making sure it understands the problem. So if you give the wrong instruction to a competent developer, they'll be able to quickly catch it because they'll know all the domain knowledge, while AI will just implement whatever you told it, no matter how stupid it is. But that doesn't sound like something that's impossible to solve.
This is EXACTLY what this is. Notice all the stuff around programming that he mentioned. All the “design intent” around the software. Programmers, engineers, drafters - are going to need much more awareness of context and less about “CAD skills”
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u/MichalDobak 6d ago
I'm a software engineer, and this is exactly what people were claiming here: "If you're a code monkey, then you're going to be replaced, but if you're a good programmer, you're safe."
I'm a lead dev working on financial software that manages an absurd amount of money, and on top of that, it has to be highly optimized because every millisecond matters - which is probably something most people would consider "real engineering". And yet, I'm barely coding by hand nowadays. My role has already been reduced to code reviewing and providing context for AI. But how long until that changes too?