> absolutely unacceptable to anyone calling themselves an Engineer

Isn’t that exactly what engineers do? Even very strong bridges aren’t designed to survive every possible eventuality.

No

I'm talking about engineering a bridge for 50 cars that collapses at 51, not engineering a bridge for 500 cars that is only expected to get 50

Engineering does require tradeoffs of course. But that's not what the minimum possible quality is

That's what a "margin of error" is. The margin of error of a bridge is predictable thanks to well-established techniques of physical analysis.

An LLM system, on the other hand, can fail because you moved some punctuation around.