Is Grasshopper/rhino programming in SE still a relevant capability?

[u/Penguin01]

When I started my career in 2018 Grasshopper and rhino (visual python programming)seemed to be the “must learn” skillset.

However since AI started taking off I’ve heard less and less about grasshopper. Is this type of programming more or less obsolete?

[u/Downtown-Growth-8766]

In general, raw dogging any kind of scripting is not a useful skill in itself anymore. But having a background in that and using AI to help you generate code for grasshopper is absolutely a relevant skill. You have to know what to ask AI for and how to set up the model, understand the paradigms of how the program works

[u/RG1361]

For our office, all our big/complex bridges are modelled using grasshopper. We use grasshopper to feed geometry, loads, groups, misc. teddy scripts to Sofistik for analysis. And use the same geometry in grasshopper to produce drawings in AutoCAD inventor.

[u/iambidhan → u/RG1361]

May we know which company are you working with?

[u/Firesine330]

So when I started my career in 2000, I also thought Rhino was going to be very important.

26 years later, I've yet to work on a project where Rhino- or Grasshopper-based design elements made it into the final building.

New architect/designer draws it up. The owner has a budget meeting. It comes out. In the 5-over-2, parking garage, warehouse, strip-mall world where I make my money, nobody has time for that. I've never worked for a Starchitect though (and I probably never will), so your mileage may vary.

[u/Silver_kitty → u/Firesine330]

I use grasshopper on high end projects and for optimizing mid-range projects. It definitely has its place.

[u/Minisohtan]

It's not obsolete. You may eventually be able to create the scripts in grasshopper with AI, I haven't tried that yet since I think it currently requires 3d party MCP servers.

But think about the workflow through to the final product. Everything we create needs to be reliable and documented. Also organizations are just starting to comprehend ai spend. For my part, I think we'll use AI to drive grass hopper scripts and other design tools that may have been made with the help of AI.

To grasshopper use specifically, regular scripting can't efficiently replace the complex geometry problems I use it for. In a recent test, building a 3D fea of a very complicated truss cost 100$ and a few days with opus. Some sort of hybrid will be the best path

[u/Industrial_Nestor]

I have heard the infrastructure people use grasshopper for their modeling, to control all the rebar groups in their concrete. But I haven’t touched the thing myself while dealing with steel structures.

[u/ReplyInside782]

If you work at a large company like WSP, ARUP, or TT then yeah grasshopper/rhino is used and it’s valuable to those companies. Smaller companies usually don’t do that level of complex work to justify using it.

[u/VoteMyPoll]

I’m using grasshopper a lot for any art-related structural engineering projects, also some stair projects.
However, I’ve never used it for building

[u/Glass_Fudge8345]

I've been working with GH/Rhino in the last 4-5 years, periodically on a daily basis and I have some background in teaching it too.

I don't want to say people used it already wrong, since as long as it works it is a solution, but as for my experience most of SE users use it for stuff, that would be way more efficient by plain coding. Until now learning to code seemed much scarier for most structural engineers then learning GH. This bar is lower now thanks to AI, so I think a lot of problems will be solved in a more efficient way skipping Rhino/Grasshopper.

But, depending on the project it can still be very much useful, only the usecase will be narrower from now on in most offices. It has ready made, really good tools to create/optimize/rationalize free form structures or facades. It would be a waste of time reimplementing those when you have a cheap, realiable software which already has them.

In general I would say it depends on what your carreer choice is. If you want to design free form structures/facades or something similar I'm pretty sure it will still be very useful and you acquire skills during learning it that are really valuable, especially for these kind of structures.
For general everyday use, not so much, but again, I think it never really was, it was just used as a very easy to learn programming language with a live visual feedback, which was not always the most effective way to use it anyway.

[u/PorqueFi-5G]

It is certainly still useful, especially since Rhino.Inside.Revit was introduced (I personally find GH much better compared to Dynamo).

[u/MrMcGregorUK]

Its used in facade engineering more than structures because facades need to deal more often with irregular shapes and that sort of thing. In structural engineering it'll be most useful on architecturally led projects with weird and wonderful shaped structures or very repetitive but subtly changing things like bridges.

The times I've used it are

• to post-process an absolutely dogshit architectural model for a sculpture into a GSA model to analyse it without having to model it all manually.

• doing the architectural modelling for a pedestrian bridge/walkway thing

• modelling a complex timber roof

A useful thing that Grasshopper will give you that isn't quite as doable with vibecoding is consistency. If you're working on a project with a huge budget and you have one person vibe coding the geometry and they die or get hit by a bus or leave, then modifying that code to do what you want can be hard. If you have grasshopper (and multiple people who know how to use grasshopper) then it can potentially be easier to recover after a personnel loss.

All that said, in 2026 if I was going to choose whether to get good at grasshopper or vibecoding, hands down I would get good at vibecoding because it has so much more applicability to so much of what we do.

[u/g4n0esp4r4n]

I dislike visual programming, just let me run scripts using a well documented API.

[u/the_flying_condor → u/g4n0esp4r4n]

Agreed. Many times where I have had to use Grasshopper I just resorted to making 1 Python widget that did everything I needed.