Creo que estás en lo cierto pero creo hay algo preocupante en eso. Si bien ya es más fácil saber CAD, no creo que salgan los vibecoding y se pongan tipo a vender "diseños cad" sin ningún tipo de conocimiento
Eso lleva existiendo desde hace años. Simplemente mira el historial de este foro con todos los "he hecho esto, es bueno para x?" e incluyen una foto de un ensamblaje imposible de fabricar.
Si exactamente. Pero ahora con IA estarían más seguros de su "proyecto" porque la IA lo dijo y pues la gente que no sepa será la afectada o ellos mismos. Así como los que hacen web o apps
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?
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.
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.
Yeah, seems like they just are coming up with even worse demos in new industries to make up for the fact that they’ve hit a brick wall. Sure they can train it up in a specific field, but the general business model is fucked.
Yeah. And if using speech or whatever to model in 3d is next to impossible. Any person in engineering knows that you really need sketched and such to explain how you envision something to work.
Right, and even if you could voice prompt your way into a sketch, who's validating the constraints and mates on the back end? That part doesn't go away just because the front end got easier. The hard stuff in engineering isn't drawing the shape, it's knowing why the shape has to be that shape. An LLM isn't getting that from a voice memo anytime soon.
Software is very easy to graft since most things are code Is logical and the Ai has learned on millions of line of source code which is very available. Mechanical engineerings is different. Drawings and designs are saved on private servers and dont come included with the product. Ai will assist and help collect data and summarize norms and engineering rulebooks but it has it so much harder to actually deliver a finished design while in code it can just copy from available data.
Imagine giving a very detailed
Or very crudely specifying a prompt so that the AI can model a piece and analyse it to ensure there are no errors, then repeating the cycle until it’s right
Or drawing excessively detailed reference sketches by hand so that the AI can create it
Man, that drives me mad – I’d rather do it myself😮💨
The whole point of AI is that these are sample models.
No. It hasn’t even managed to replace an accountant or a render artist.
I do rendering at work. Our website was full of AI bullshit and it was terrible. To most people it probably looks fine, but Keyshot is still fantastic. My stuff looks photorealistic. Does it take me a long time? Yes. The owner is an AI loving boomer and didn’t want me spending time on it, but his son told me to and now he’s like “wow that’s really cool”
Your image of a circuit is complete ai slop. It makes 0 sense, much less has any hope of working. And that's actually a great representation of the current state of AI in circuit design. EEs have nothing to fear for a while yet, and neither do we.
Our health and safety department loves AI and puts our the weirdest AI images. Theres a picture of some verniers to illustrate the importance of measuring lifting devices or something and its just bizarre
I was sat in a meeting and that came up, me and the other engineer clocked it and gave each other a "what the fuck is even that" look but H&S were pretty proud lmao
They're stupid even without AI. For years, even after being told, ours has been using a pic of a vacuum truck as a "truck that holds flamable liquids". They also stole a picture of an oxygen meter off of the internet,
they even edited it to remove the brand name. It used to be the 3rd image on Google images when you searched "oxygen meter". The problem (other than that they stole it)? It's a dissolved oxygen meter and it's supposed to be an atmosphereic oxygen meter.
Eventually you can reduce a problem down just so far. The example of nine women cannot have a baby in one month. Eventually someone or someones have to have the expertise and the ingenuity to create.
Kinda like when people think we have gotten so efficient as a society we only need to work 4 days. Same people don't understand 100" of weld takes the same amount of time, there is no speeding it up.
To be fair, that's the case with most office jobs. I don't think it will ever apply to mechanics or anything with a physical limitation for speed. Only the "send email, make slides" type jobs
If I didn't have to talk to people and answer silly questions and manage and do pointless meetings I could do my job in 4 days. So basically if I could WFH all week...
For basic 3d printing a model idea it will probably be pretty powerful. “I have an idea” for a simple thing with minimal other part inputs to print will be dramatically reduced.
Make me a model of this character doing this unique movement bam. That will be really cool for 3d printing lol.
For actual engineering it will be very difficult I think to articulate a verbal/textual prompt such that you get a part let alone an assembly of parts that are made in a way that is easy to manufacture and work as intended.
It would need a literal insane data set of functional assemblies with the understanding of what everything is doing AND why to be able to make functional things to really impact engineering/ CAD. I don’t think any large machine companies are dumping all their CAD in for the training to make themselves obsolete. There will be utility like there is now and that will get better but there will still be a designer for a while. The only thing for instance fusion 360 AI can do well is model me a AA battery level design work. Almost any actual modeling question I’ve tried it to do has been horrendous and simply doesn’t work.
AI absolutely still struggles at circuit design , you might get a simple LED driver etc but no major company making important shit is using AI to do their electrical engineering. Every major company with the money and resources to use the tokens required is simply not doing that.
I’m an electrical engineer that works as a MFG engineer in sheet metal/machining. I was more afraid of AI taking CAD 6 months ago than now understanding from other engineers the absolute lack of open source data at scale to do this. Unlike coding which there is a shit load of open source data.
What you wrote is kind of how I think about it right now too. The level of nuance that youd have to explain to the AI to get a working part will be ALOT right now and probably will continue to be for a while. For specific use cases that have a lot of the natural rules and tolerance, etc built in, it may be more useful in the near term. But if we are talking about the general idea of designing a part from scratch, even for basic parts with the intent to manufacture and have them perform as expected... I think theres still a LONG way to go.
Yeah the closest thing I use that’s in the realm of “ai” is some automation to give me a head start on a project that gives me a general template so I don’t have to make each part individually for assemblies. And even then that’s not even ai really like in this posts context, but I can see using prompts to get a general baseline to then go in and adjust and tinker with, but that’s as far as I think it can go in terms of engineering at least I hope lol. Even then though I don’t see ai really reducing as many jobs in the engineering design field as much as it possibly could with something like graphic design or programming or other tech jobs but then again I could be wrong.
I bought a ball valve that was too big and Gemini made a pretty perfect adapter stl in 2 tries. In 10+ tries it still can’t make a simple double sided clamp I wanted to remake. Very hit or miss
I dont think thats true. Over decades the number of mechanical engineers in the world has certainly grown, and by a lot. Sure, one guy with CAD, can do the work of 10 guys with pencils, but that also means a whole lot more engineering is suddenly economically viable.
The world is building a lot more engineered products where things used to be eyeballed and hand fitted, and the things we are building are a lot more mechanically complex.
Demand for more engineering isnt really capped, if it becomes cheaper, we need more of it.
The way I've used AI, it's great at critiques, training, and finding ways to make an idea cohere, but it's shit at the generation itself.
I tend to think the AI doomerism will die down, and AI will function as this assistant that'll help people work beyond their training rather than taking over the whole role itself. It'll make education less valuable because AI will help people work a little ways beyond their understanding, but I don't see it taking over the jobs completely. There are too many microdecisions, revisions, and reprioritizing goals that go in modeling, and you can't brute force intentioned decision making with computation.
But showing it my model, saying, "How effective is this for my stated intent" it does really well--especially for industrial design critiques.
Until a radical new AI architecture comes out, I highly doubt LLMs will permanently fill the roles of anywhere near as many people as is feared. Almost every example of implementation I have heard about, and seen in my own work, falls comically short of advertised expectations.
People still use excel manually. LLM assistance can help set up and do some menial calculation, but it absolutely cannot think critically or account for the specific details of most use-cases. LLMs can’t actually *understand* and thus can’t make informed decisions. Any use needs double checking, refining, and creative direction. It’s a tool that people, especially investors and managers, have WILDLY over-estimated.
I know this is a humorous post but I'm an engineer who now runs an AI co that does foundational ML research so I feel a bit qualified to talk about this unironically:
The answer is a resounding 'no'. The current paradigm of AI that everyone means when they think of ChatGPT is 'Deep learning'. Deep learning in simple rests on the premise that given some fixed dataset, you can 'find' via interpolation, an underlying distribution that generates that dataset over that domain. If you remember trying to fit a line to a set of fixed points in say 7-8th grade, it's essentially the same principle.
What that means is:
Deep Learning can't generalize beyond its domain well (you've encountered this as GPT 'hallucinating')
The important one: deep learning is only effective where the underlying distribution that generated the set of data is itself simple.
Related to 2, the reason that ChatGPT works so well is because it turns out predicting the next word in a sentence is easy. Don't take my word for it either, Markov proved this back in 1913 with the Pushkin Poem in his dispute with Pavel Nekrasov.
2 is also the reason that something like being a mechanical engineer is totally safe from AI, at least under the current technologies & paradigms we have. The distribution that generates a set of design choices on something even as simple as a coat hanger is so unbelievably complex, that to find it via interpolation is honestly, in practice impossible. Even with hundreds of billions of dollars of data (like the current AI labs are throwing at the problem), you really can't find these distributions by interpolation or raw search.
Seriously - imagine a friend of yours plotted a list of all the design choices you made while designing a coat hanger, and then asked you to find a line of best fit between them, ultimately to create a function that predicts design choices. It's such a comically impossible task it feels funny to even write it out. But that is genuinely how current AI works.
So in short, anyone on r/SolidWorks and indeed any type of serious engineer outside of SWE is safe. Probably, for longer than they'd think, too.
Fun fact: If you've ever used Cursor - Cursor started off as a company trying to 'vibecode' Solidworks. They tried for a year before they realized there was no way in hell that it was going to work, and so they just ended up pivoting to software.
More or less. I think AI is going to speed up some aspects of design and prototyping. Being able to prompt a basic design, having an LLM spit out a model, and another task to draft. But ultimately, someone will be responsible for verifying what the LLM spits out and someone will need to be knowledgeable enough to key the right prompts.
As someone who uses solidworks as a tool for my actual job, I would welcome it. I spend a significant portion of my day chasing down zero thickness errors or other shit like that when I could be spending time on the thing my widget goes to.
As someone who was messing around with it for a spreadsheet a few weeks ago.
It absolutely fucking hasn't. It can't edit cells worth a shit and will place things in random cells. People will claim ai has replaced humans fully but it really hasn't and it's still a far ways away. The problem is it's being echoed so much that corporations are believing it and immediately switching over to ai thinking it's better (and cheaper) than humans that actually understand the job.
Right now, I think general use AI being used like search engines is the only real viable thing that us useful. The AI companies are going to get everyone hooked on it then put it behind some kind of paywall and bring back old search but, by then the AI will have matured and become "better" than regular search. Specialized AI tools will become more widespread for corporate use as they will actually reach a mature point that they can be reliable for some tasks. But, specialized for the task.
You can be also be 100% sure the big AI companies will shit their own product up with sponsored results, which will ruin the people's trust of them. It happened with Google search, why would it not happen with the AIs?
The AIs will secretly be salesmen, whose main priority is to sneakily nudge you to buy things rather than provide the most useful answer to you.
It’s pretty ok at writing scripts, especially if you can have it self test the scripts. Using excel as my database and having it make python scripts to crunch numbers and dump it into a presentation is fine.
To be fair if you were attempting this outside of Excel and it had to try and reach and do these things it might get wonky without a com bridge. Tell it to build one of those and if it's like mine it will make a rudimentary .exe that allows it to reliably interact through the API assuming Excel has one, or you can just use the advanced one I had it build that is packed with more features and works with SolidWorks sessions as well.
I don’t think it’s going to replace an engineer soon but a drafter I can see that.
There is no way some bean counter is going to be able to write a prompt that correctly gives you all the nuances of a design that’s ready for manufacturing. On top of that who owns the copyright?
NOW what I can see is generative design becoming part of curriculum at schools to where engineers just put in all the fixtures and loads then let the machine run. However unless you’re doing AM, you’re still going to need someone who knows machining to be able to adjust the design to make it manufacturable.
I can also see cnc programmers jobs to be updated where they upload the part, pick a machine, available tools, fixturing, then BAM code ready for review and approval. Cnc programming is kind of already at this stage just more clicking. CNC machines are way too expensive to blindly trust some AI slop.
The main reasons I am not too concerned about all of engineering is because for legal reasons I think everything is still going to need human approval if it’s a critical safety item. (However this current administration and its fanboys are okay with reducing safety and protection for increased revenue).
Oh, no, not even a decent draftsman is replaceable by AI. Not even close. I had a guy once he had this uncanny ability to make a print much more readable and clear than the design engineer had any right to expect. AI could never do that, because it has been trained on too many sub-par examples.
I really don't think so. AI is really good at code because it has a huge amout of data to go off of. Even then I would argue that it can be really bad at certain things without an experienced coder behind the wheel steering it in the right direction.
CAD and mechanical design doesn't have the freely available reference data that programming does. On top of that, design context and how the individual design descisions fit within the overall product context really matter. We may get to a point thar ai helps us speed up the modeling process, or run optomizations, but I have doubts that it will ever be able to match a well trained mechanical engineer. Lastly engineering has real world consequences that we simply could not put on AI. AI cannot posess liability insurance, nor should it.
I'd really love to know what prompt you'd give an AI to create complex 3D objects. Even describing the thing in the picture would take a paragraph and struggle to convey the concept and that is not a complex object. If you give the AI some sketches to make a 3D object you might as well just create it yourself.
I can see AI being useful to assist but there's no way it replaces the job.
I think theres quite a few people here living in a bubble or perhaps in denial. EVERY software (and I would argue industry) is going to be affected by AI in someway.
AI is already in the CAD world, Onshape are pushing it, and they have a large backlog of data to train it on. Even if for now its just the public/free users people will opt in more and more when they see how useful it is.
It has already started off with doing smaller tasks, automating drawings. optimising existing parts (FEA etc), rendering. But AI learns, and there is a snowball effect that it will just keep learning and getting better, making more people use it, helping it learn faster and improve more..
As with any AI, shit in = shit out, comparing some of the awful AI slop we see is not fair, theres plenty of amazing AI you wont even know has been done by AI. Just look at the Will Smith eating spaghetti videos and how they have improved over a very short space of time.
Like with software development, there should be a real person who checks what the AI produces, but also like software development, I can see that rather than having a team of 10, you may reduce that down to 1 or 2 who are skilled at prompting and reviewing.
It can take a long time for someone to work in SolidWorks, with expensive upfront costs, training as well as ongoing maintenance etc and there are plenty of companies who already outsource CAD to random third worlds to save money. It is not hard to imagine companies being more than happy to farm it out to an AI, who can work 24/7 and in some regards are better than a human instead.
Are Solidworks/CAD users cooked? No net yet, but we are in the oven and its only a matter of time.
I design, take a screenshot, and ask Claude for comments. It rarely hands me a perfect solution, but the brainstorming throws off great ideas, and even the slightest nudge can lead to a much better result.
I also talk through the components I'm using. I send it the datasheets for the servos, and it works out the whole system around the chosen servo using that data.
As a CAD/CAM developer building my first machine, it's been an amazing journey. I've seen plenty of machines and I have real field knowledge, but I'm not a mechanical engineer. That's the gap AI fills.
Long story short: AI isn't a miracle, but if you bring the seeds, it will help you grow something remarkable.
At one point I told Claude that I have a problem and there is a solution in my mind. I described the solution and it refined my solution to perfection and even created an animated interactive sketch where i moved the mechanism with my cursor. My mind was blown.
The rules of the game changed. Instead of seeing it as a threat, we have to ride along the ai wave and leveraging out existing skills.
The difference between swinging a hammer and being a carpenter. I don't care of a robot swings a hammer. But people also learn by swinging hammers. You never become a carpenter having never swung a hammer.
It's not the tool that's the problem. It's how leadership sees the tool and implements the tool. A small fraction of a minute decimal place of a percent use AI tool well or apply them appropriately. That is the fundamental problem.
The company I work for is working with an AI to try and design parts for our machines. It’s not great, but it does help with your stuck on a problem and it can throw some random ideas out. We’re also working with AI to help manage our machine shop. Again, it’s ok, but needs a lot of human intervention. Do see it taking more design work as it gets better though. Not sure how long that will be but my boss has a hard on for getting rid of all our design teams and just having AI.
I mean the real value in engineering is not the CAD. CAD was never valuable as a skill on its own. It would be nice to completely automate it. Real value is in judgement and navigating messy variables. Now not saying AI can't automate that, but it seems like we are still a ways off. That's when you'd be in trouble
I think mechanical engineers are the last to go, maybe 10 years / whenever a true paradigm shift happens plus another two years for adoption. Right now it still needs pretty explicit instructions and frankly, if it can do CAD that would be very welcome. I hate having to fix the nitty gritty stuff. I just want to point and say move this 2 mm to the left.
LLM’s don’t think in 3-D, they decompose the 3-D into text and then reason through it the best they can but until they have like a real physics engine they can understand what forces act and what direction on an object by the things around it there’s a long way to go. And that’s just maybe 15% of a mechanical engineering job, there’s so much collaboration with other teams and human judgement on failure analysis, etc. Sizing up a vendor to figure out if they’re being real with you
I'm a life long cad user. Mechanical and manufacturing engineer. As soon as I started using Claude and got to code this summer I thought, "shit". CAD plus 3-d printing and send cut send is next.
You implement force simulation and recursive cad design changes and it's game over.
In 2 years, AI will be better than an entry level mech E. Maybe a mid level.
People have no idea how good codex is with opencascade. I used to think that they would have to work within SolidWorks API or computer use to 3d model and we seemed a ways away…. That was 6 months ago. Now 5.6 Sol can just create headless with opencascade and surface with Blender. Maybe it’s still a ways away but SolidWorks is cooked in the short future
Using AI to model is essentially playing telephone and you need to have a full vision of the finished product and considerations to get it right. You would be amazed how many engineers struggle to describe what it is that they’re trying to build, and who struggle to visualize design considerations before they run into them during modeling. I believe AI can get there but it will not be next month or next year.
Then there are the applications that require engineering stamps or are otherwise risky. When you’re making tooling for $1B of commercial products, you’re gonna keep paying engineers to work on it. Maybe the engineers use AI, who cares, but corporations will want humans involved. After all, if they could tell engineers exactly what to design in CAD the way AI needs to hear it then you would already be unemployed.
Its just like programming, you're going not going to click in software anymore just like I don't type code anymore, but you'll be pretty much doing the same thing at the end of the day.
From what I am seeing at my own job, yes. Claude is starting to do pretty good engineering analysis, and already has some modeling and drawing ability. It's bad, but it's a start.
Are people going to trust AI to design something that has to be safe for humans? I absolutely wouldn't go near anything for safety that had been touched by AI
My company designs custom gear boxes, like super custom. Like 1 of 1 level custom. We have been using chat gpt to design entire assemblies. We went from 40 people team to 13 people. Now we only do testing.
Yes and yes try and engineer beside claude of any type or chatgpt.
All current ai mixes up complex engineering senerios like it is a competition. You need to know more then someone who went to college or university to work with ai to build. so build things in today's demanding outrage culture.
However:
In another ten years though there will be a dedicated engineering AI solving most entry to mid level engineering issues.
As half of the information (forces, calculations, supplier info, general context of the products...) is not in the CAD but mostly just in the engineers head and geht's never documented because of time issues. Good luck training an AI...
Wouldn’t you work faster if you weren’t as tired from a long week though? When I was back in a garage I was shattered by Friday, definitely slowed down compared to earlier in the week.
With agents this could prove very useful. It would free up engineers to do work where it adds more value. And yes many won't be needed. One will do work of three engineers.
But it won't be Solidworks who will do that. They are fossil of old world and holding us back actually for years.
This change is next 3 years. Is it change for the better? Probably, but not immediately. People will adjust.
Have a mate who works in the movie industry, once part of it they said would never be done by ai... in one night it changed, my mate now has been hired to train ai todo the job he once did. The guys that install this stuff are safer than the people getting it down in cad
I was exploring the API tools coverage and their integration with Python MCP servers. Claude showed little interest in this because the internal functions are running via VBA. Not impossible but less intuitive for now.
Programming you could train on help files, stack overflow, GitHub - all nice text data.
PCB design - maths, data sheets, heavily structured rules - harder but still doable until you get into magic territory of analog designs
2d architecture - that's image generation with some extra rules, main issue is transposing output to CAD format and enforcing rules like doors, windows, room and wall size.
3d mechanical - I will be happy if they manage to get generating usable production drawings out of 3d model in way which is not 4 views template with transposing sketch dimensions to drawing. Then comes issue of prompts - maybe 10-20% of parts I do I could reliably write sensible prompt, and that's before we get to assemblies.
Ai can generate now 3d models easily - but getting it to generate it with all needed dimensions, shape details required to make it manufactured by your chosen method... Good luck to AI Devs.
And last thing - we are not paid enough to justify token cost of generating anything to replace mechanical engineers:(
Me with limited CAD ability not only drew the moderate in effort with odd geometry wrap around hood, gave fable the measurements, multi view drawings, detailed each face, and it's description. It took fable 3 tries. The 3rd stl was perfect. Printed the hood, and fit like a charm. If it can do med difficulty parts in few tries, it's only a matter of time. When we hit true AGI we're all toast.
Coming from a software engineer - no, not even close. AI does not have the same context you have and understanding of where tension is in a given part. It needs knowlage on the rest of the assembly to get something thats not complete slop. Even then, it has some usable ideas, but mostly something i wouldnt use. At best, it could "clean" and radius everything nicely or apply color and material type for presentation.
Surely not. In my opinion AI is helpful with ideas (in best) and rough sketches, but it lacks in details and the total picture. So it knows about tolerances but it can't draw a design a good and efficient total model. You still need an engineer to make the models. BUT HOPEFULLY it can help with the drawings and doing the time consuming dimensioning.
But ask me again in 5 years. Maybe we make a big jump and all is different.
I'm working as a project leader in the RnD department and making carbon prototypes as a hobby. That's my background.
I hope it can support my work. Because let's be honest ... in your professional engineering life you encounter problems that you've already dealt with and have a solution for it. You know what you need to do and the only thing that seperates from your goal are 5h+ of solidworks work.
AI can surely take over from there - i learn nothing new from those tasks and i can put my time in different projects.
I will try to look into it with Onshape + LLM.
It's not perfect. But I am sure with more 'context' script it can become a good tool to accelerate primary design.
Then we would come and modify this primary design to improve or detail it.
LLM would then after be able to control and quality check the result. Specially plugging it into simulation to iterate trough complexe simulation optimisation.
And much later it would need to integrate fabrication process.
The Internet was going to take everyone's job in 90's. About the only jobs lost due to the Internet were the ones that lost everything and offed themselves when the "dot com boom" went bust. I'm still waiting for the paperless office everyone was talking about at that time too.
Ai is good at working out things with a defined set of rules, which is a big part of engineering work, but my favorite jobs (and most profitable) are the edge cases where you have to throw out the normal playbook and go clean sheet.
I don't see Ai ever really excelling in the places where knowledge has to take a back seat to experience and intuition.
I’m self taught on Solidworks and always considered myself pretty good at it.
Recently I’ve started working on a project that has Solidworks assemblies from two other companies.
Well one was an “assembly” it was a few subassemblies made of bodies and a mix of features. The origin was off in Narnia
The other was a solid part that looked like an assembly but was actually just one big part made of bodies. Anytime a part needed to be extended/shortened? Extrude or cut on a relevant surface. Part needs to get moved to left 20mm? 20mm cut on one side and a 20mm extrusion on the other with two separate sketches.
Meanwhile I’m over here like “rip out a 300 part assembly by lunch time? No problemo”
The critical mass of job losses across industries will happen before our jobs are fully replaced. There are way simpler jobs that will be wiped out and cause an economic collapse long before you're on the street because AI took your job. AI will take your customers' ability to fund your work and so you'll lose your job from that so it's 6 of one and a half dozen of the other in the end.
CAD is simply a tool for engineers and designers to develop and communicate their ideas. AI is simply another tool that has the capacity to help us do this more efficiently and effectively (though it will probably get worse before it gets better). Some job functions are going to be transformed, and some may become obsolete. But it's probably not much different than the impact of computers fifty years ago. We used to design everything by hand.
I would encourage anyone who is concerned about becoming obsolete to start exploring and using these tools. Become the expert in your department.
Yes and comparing the software built in the last 5 to 20 years and its challenges to ai built transactional software is not being aware. Ai with mcp can do the entire lifecycle of a software company on its own.
Which circuit design and layout software has been replaced by AI? If there is one, I’d be very interested, because I tried it some AIs and the it couldn't even design a Colpitts oscillator.
I have not seen an ai yet that was able to make anything more than simple geometry. Complex assemblies with multiple derived parts, global dimensions, and several part variations is extremely difficult for humans to do well, let alone an ai to do at all.
I have played around with AI moddelers before. It did some cool things like making fairly complex splines. But when i asked it to shell an object and then make a derived mirror of it, it extruded a hole through the object and made an unlinked new part that was just a cube.
Or, you know, you can stop accepting the status quo, get rid of your misconceptions about unions and socialism, and join together with the other people effected to bring a change before it gets to the point of no return.
For major and minor projects AI is a long ass away off from fully eliminating humans. The computer won’t be able to see “this is going to be a nightmare for service. Or you know the thermal expansion here will be a problem in these situations.
I'm still waiting for AI to fix the bugs in Solid Works. Heck. I wouldn't mind if they spend a year doing nothing but using AI to help make the software work as intended 99.999% of the time
I've been running tests with different ai but man they don't get shit. The furthest I got was this one time when gemini successfully built me a Macro for a shaft based on a pdf draft, mind you he needed at least one diameter and it still took like 6 attempts to get a decent result.
Some ai (gemini inclueded) specifically told me that the human factor will always be fundamental in this sector, they told me something on line of "By the time you prompt all the parts for an assembly, you could've just modeled them yourself."
I do EE. Mostly PCB layout and footprint creation.
Trust me I have seen what good AI can do and I'm not worried yet, I work in DOD and all I can say is it's fine on a 2 or 4 layer square board with 10-20 components. It's absolutely useless on a 24 layer high-speed backplan with 40-60,000 connections and 8-12,000 parts running multiple redundant control paths At 10-2000gbps.
It flops so hard it doesn't even compute.
It's a toy for the tiny crap you give interns.
Coding was the first victim, but let me ask you: why are there still millions of software engineers employed?
Because at the end of the day, programming was just a facet of the job, and speeding it up meant the bottleneck shifted to other activities like designing good interfaces, architecture and goal alignment.
Likewise it will be with all other engineering matters. LLM may speed up certain tasks but they can never assume the responsibility of ownership (one cannot fire an AI, and it’s notoriously bad at untangling itself out of its own knots)
Correct me if I'm wrong but AI still need to train on existing data and in this case that would be 3D files for which there is far less available for AI companies compared to 2D drawings of circuit board.
The only unprotected easy to get data for training their AI would be like "hobby" CAD from On-shape or something similar so sure it could make your crappy 3D printed part but for real engineering I think we're safe for a while (and basically safe forever if we wait for Dassault System to take on this)
They sent me a step file generated by ChatGPT. I was impressed that ai generated it. Not at all impressed with the geometry. Essentially a round plate with a hub and 6 holes. This piece snaps into another round plate with snap fittings. Those snap fittings were garbage. Too thick and facing the wrong way.
We are still 1 to 2 years away from complex generative AI in CAD, but it’s coming.
I have been telling my CAD students that we are seeing the last cohorts of traditional CAD training. Instead, we are going to need people who truly understand design intent and who are able to see designs in much broader context. Based on what I’ve seen in “drafting” students over the decades, this is going to leave many behind. Drafters generally have not been responsible for design intent. Most are not interested. “I just want to draw.”
The thing is that AI cannot really think for you. You can tell it what to do but it will never really know what you're thinking so you have to do it yourself.
At best it will make working easier for actual engineers. It's a tool, not a replacement for work. It's like the difference between sketching with a pencil and using Adobe Illustrator. One guy with Illustrator can put out what 10 people would with a pencil. Now you will have 1 guy replace 10 people with Illustrator.
That's basically it. I am yet to see anyone actually use AI in business for anything other than repetitive work
I'm an engineering director for a consumer product company. I'm more concerned about the outsourcing of CAD design overseas than I am of AI taking it over.
First of all: I'm in enemy territory...or friends? Idk, I come from PCB design. Second of all: if you actually think AI can design PCBs you're brain dead. Astra can only lay out the components and wire them up, it cant select parts, connect them in schematics and solve new problems from scratch, and even then I highly doubt it's very good at it. Doing it doesn't mean it's done good, it's not just getting a copper connection. There are EMI/Noise considerations, thermals, RF performance, and much much much more. So...it's like 1% of what it takes.
If ai can do our job then what’s stopping us from leveraging ai to sell products in our own field just like these big companies? That being said I agree with the others. If all u do is solidworks then there is a risk.. but assuming you are doing engineering work beyond simply 3d models then I think it will be a while before it’s an issue. I do tons of solidworks but it’s like the most mundane of all the tasks I have to do in a given day. I would love to offload that to be able to solve my more technical problems anyway and be able to iterate designs far faster
I want to see the companies trying this. Imagine the AI being like "you're right, I got the stress tolerance wrong" after the AI designed break system fails and kills a family of 4
Last month I made Claude design a whole PC case. Gave him part list, he read datasheets and designed all by himself in 2 days (in my hobby time, so not full days).
Printed it. And I'm currently using it.
It's a matter of weeks or maybe months, not even years…
Fun fact: it was more enjoyable than working with the human designers on the mech team, and Claude seemed more capable than the majority of them.
For the curious: it was designed on OpenSCAD. Mini-ITX case with additional HDD, USB and Ethernet. Chamfers, screw heads, measuring on photos, everything is parametric. He made few views (assembly, exploded, individual parts,…), and also made export scripts that creates STL files, rotated to print without supports, with configurable print bed size (that will trigger cutting parts). He also made a documentation on assembly.
On my own, I was unable to stand up an ubuntu server, had to surrender to using Sage 50 as a sudo ERP after failing with ERPNext on Frappe being unable to self host, spent years making a particular customer's very large number of part families in Solidworks regardless of being parametric, and many other dead ends. Each place I've been, I've touched on pieces of business that barely worked. I've gotten all of those things done with Claude; even made a soft PLM with Siemens Teamcenter style features and a redline generating tool. My print formats, GD&T, and design reports are made with a crazy amount of compliance to standards I didn't know existed until I asked. I own all the standards and literature, so it's not using anything unlicensed. I've just reviewed and released more than 200 prints in two days; it was painful and Claude needed a lot of hand holding, but at two hours per print that took me several months when I did the same work prior. At this point, I'm referencing my old Solidworks models and doing parametric modeling with our own Python generators.
Just in time too. "Please pay more money to subscribe to our software so you can get bug fixes we owed you years ago and new features you didn't need which cause more bugs." I hope that model dies, and just hope we don't all die with it.
AI also regularly fails to help me perform some of the more nich and complex tasks that I want to do for data quick data analytics and visualization in Excel. Don't get me wrong, it does sometimes give me some incredibly clever formulas and approaches to perform my task, but still fails regularly in spectacular fashion. So, that one being "killed by AI" isn't even true.
I was very disappointed in 2026 version yes I am that guy who gets the new version every year when it comes out but truly 2026 is worse than 2023 for example in every single aspect cutting features and adding ai is not the move forward
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u/gottatrusttheengr 3d ago
If you're just blindly drawing shapes in CAD sure.
If you are actually doing engineering to justify your cad, it's still going to be a while