Bruh. (Gaming)

by squidnh3, Monday, March 30, 2026, 12:52 (2 hours, 59 minutes ago) @ Claude Errera

If you have specific examples, great, give them. ("It can be helpful for organizing" is not what I mean.) The issues with generative AI are (very often) specific to the ethical value of what's being created; if you have examples of generative AI being used in ways that are useful to humans without stealing from them, please, by all means, share.

Generative AI with respect to coding agents is probably going to revolutionize the engineering industry. From my perspective in specifically structural engineering, our digital tools have long suffered from a lack of development investment. Being a software developer for a niche structural analysis tool isn't exactly sexy when compared to something like developing a video game, so mostly those companies seem to rely on engineers that happen to have some coding background (a rarity). It's even worse for bespoke tools developed on a per-company basis - usually some random guy who knew VBA built some spreadsheet that no one understands, and then when that person leaves the company and the structural legal codes get updated, the tool gets dust binned because nobody has the expertise to updated it.

Communication between companies on projects is shackled by historical methods - very recently at my company the best practices for one workflow involved another company plotting numbers on drawings, and our company taking those numbers and transcribing them into our spreadsheets, creating new drawings with numbers based on those original numbers, giving those to another company, and then they plot those numbers on yet another drawing, and then we manually went through and checked each number on hundreds of new drawings. Nobody questioned that this was a reasonable approach until I got involved. I spent hundreds of hours developing a Matlab script to streamline this, which was my only option since it was the only coding language I was recently familiar with. If I hadn't had at least a minimal experience with programming in my background, they'd probably still be doing it the old way.

Now, in just the last 2 years, these AI chatbots and agents are so good at programming, what was taking me weeks now just takes a few hours or less. That means we can now continue to build and maintain useful tools in a reasonable amount of time, in any language we choose. Other people can iterate on those tools far more easily. Better tools will let us work faster, design more efficient things, and make less mistakes doing so. The biggest problem we all see right now is how we will need to come up with different methods of training - previously the best way to train new engineers was to have them do extremely tedious things over and over until they understood the simple thing inside-out. That will soon no longer be an option.

The training problem aside, I am quite optimistic that generative AI from a coding perspective will be a huge boost to the engineering industry. We've been working with one hand tied behind our back, and I envision AI as not only untying the arm, but maybe giving us a few more limbs to work with.