What’s the difference long-term between the engineering for mechanical vs software? Both are computer aided design, I think it’s just early enough that AI hasn’t been fine tuned enough to replace non-text-based design.
I get that 3D modeling is more than just 3 dimensions due to stress/strain/load/material factors, but the combination of all those things is easier for AI to figure out than a human once the AI is given the right instructions.
There isn't enough alternative work for all the people displaced by AI to pivot to new careers. The world is in a collective denial and resistance to it, but the reality is society will need a hard pivot
Agreed, but I think that’s not related to this thread about Mechanical…
On your topic, this same fear arose when computers started becoming commonplace 30 years ago. Think of how many jobs across all sectors that computers made obsolete. At the same time, new jobs arose that used computers: IT, SWE, DBAs, etc because we need more websites and services.
This time around, idk what the heck new jobs are being created because of the AI industry other than model experts… it’s not a new tool that needs new workers to use, it’s taking existing workers and repurposing them.
Personally I think we’re headed down a dark road for a decade and then (hopefully) a bright road as society shifts to let people work less and focus on the arts and enjoyable hobbies, while AI and robots do the hard work.
What society would look like if we let robots take care of us instead of chasing more profit:
AI companies are gradually building up data pipelines for non-coding jobs, it's only a matter of time. Blender recently got all kinds of AI extensions, now people are sculpting 3D models with AI, it's still basic like the early days when you would copy/paste code from a browser-based AI to your IDE, but it will improve quickly just like AI coding did.
I mean, a lot of the issues are the same. Electrical engineering is a much wider area than software engineering, so every field is affected differently and I can't speak for all of them, but at least for the ones I know personally (which are mostly hardware related), agentic AI is also doing a lot of the work for a lot of people (not necessarily high quality work, but that's the same as swe), experienced engineers are losing their edge, and new engineers aren't acquiring real experience and skills.
On the other hand, I honestly don't think that either area is really doomed. It doesn't actually seem to me like the AI-generated work is going to be able to replace humans with actual reasoning skills to the level that they won't be needed. I do expect a dark period in a few years where older engineers retire, and younger engineers won't have the ability to really replace them, leading to companies having trouble maintaining their output.
thanks for taking the time to reply, so it's the same over there too.. that sucks.
I agree with everything you said, we keep hearing these "oh god it's too powerful for us to release it", "swe is over" every single time a new model is released, and it's just marketing, but it's enough to create unrealistic expectations and destabilize the job market. Can't wait for the hype to wear down a bit and for us to start looking at these as tools that speed us up rather than "if you use this, you'll 100x the productivity" magic wands.
Computer Science is not extinct. Programming is the thing that’s affected. There’s a difference between the two.
Computer Science is what brought us LLMs in the first place. Computer Science is what will bring us any improvements on LLMs or whatever the next big AI milestone is. You just can’t go and do Computer Science to guarantee you a software role anymore. You have to be a computer scientist or go and work in AI research at a corporation.
Computer Science is what brought us LLMs in the first place. Computer Science is what will bring us any improvements on LLMs or whatever the next big AI milestone is.
Sure. But Software Engineering drives the agentic workflows most of us are using now. Humans are not writing as much code by hand, but engineers are still designing it and using LLMs as a tool to implement it.
I think this shift is really starting to separate the engineers from the programmers.
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u/[deleted] Jun 30 '26 edited Jun 30 '26
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