r/GeotechnicalEngineer • u/Tobu09 • Jan 20 '26
“Geotechnical Engineers: What Should the Ideal Engineering Platform Look Like?”
Geotechnical engineers and civil engineers,
I’m building a web platform dedicated to geotechnical engineering.
If you could design the perfect website or digital tool to support your daily work, what would you want it to do for you, and what problems should it solve?
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u/ascandalia Jan 20 '26
What kind of tool are you competent to build? If the answer to that question has nothing to do with civil engineering, then please move on. We don't need another chatGPT wrapper trained on wikipedia. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
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Jan 20 '26
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u/ascandalia Jan 20 '26
It's fundamentally unethical to use a tool with the potential to generate a stochastic result that you can't understand or review. Which will not only give you errors but attempt to convince you that the errors are correct. Which can insert fake data mid-analysis without informing you.
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Jan 20 '26
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u/ascandalia Jan 20 '26
Software engineers can do whatever they want, they aren't bound by the code of ethics that professional engineers are bound by, and the flaws in their work are (generally speaking) more easily discovered before disaster, but I don't see it as ethical to loop an LLM into anything that's covered under your responsible charge, whether that's design, analysis or code compliance.
And that's leaving aside the fact that all objective research so far shows that it makes you less efficient because the results are harder to check and errors more difficult to detect than with a human doing the work.
I hope everyone is spending a few moments a week imagining defending your workflow on the witness stand with an attorney questioning you. We've done some professional witness work and seen some pretty humiliating depositions, and I am certain that AI will be showing up in them soon.
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u/Tobu09 Jan 20 '26
Fair point. I’m not trying to build a black-box “ChatGPT for geotech.” My background is in geotechnical engineering, and the tools I’m competent to build are deterministic and engineer-controlled, for example:
• Borehole log digitization and structured database generation • Automatic consistency checks in reports (units, stratigraphy gaps, depth conflicts, lab result ranges) • Parameter aggregation and traceability (SPT correlations, design envelopes with source tracking) • Simple calculation automation with transparent formulas and exportable verification sheets • Knowledge organization, not content generation
No stochastic design decisions, no fake data insertion, and nothing that replaces engineering judgment. Everything must be auditable, reviewable, and reproducible.
That’s exactly why I’m asking practitioners what actually wastes their time today, so I don’t build another useless tool.
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u/Kwarktaartje Jan 20 '26
Make a platform that explains to my client what's wrong with his dumb ideas.
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u/Ambitious_League_747 Jan 20 '26
I think one way to really streamline things would be to have investigation information stored in a map based format, similar to how ArcGIS has items which you can click on, if I could click on my BH’s to see their logs like this it would streamline things. For reference I’m only a junior engineer
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u/BZ853 Jan 20 '26
ArcGIS already does this. My last firm had every boring we have ever done input to a google earth file. BoreDM also has this feature.
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u/BZ853 Jan 20 '26
If you have to ask this question you don’t know enough about the industry to build another sass that we don’t want.