I would wager that plenty of bridges are designed by a single engineer, most bridges are not massive 8-lane highway bridges but small bridges in municipalities.

A single person can design a building, why not a bridge?

P.S. I sell and run commercial construction work

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dylan604 2 days ago | parent [-]

So you’re saying when you run those jobs or the team you sell the job to have no one that’s ever built anything before to see plans and ask questions? So if I accept the premise that a single person designed a bridge that that’s all that would be done to ensure it meets the specifications? You’re saying that nobody would ever review the plans? Nobody would say the bolts being used are too small for purpose, or any number of things that could pop up? The concrete pads are insufficient? The steel I-beams are too thin? Someone would just take the plans exactly as listed, purchase the material as listed, and not one question ever would be raised? I would never trust a construction team that didn’t raise questions if not even to see if they themselves could skimp on material to pocket the difference.

	▲	quickthrowman a day ago \| parent [-]
		You raise a number of good points, my example wasn’t as strong as I thought. I was attempting to contrive a scenario that was similar to a lawyer using an LLM and not reviewing the output, the civil engineering example isn’t a great due to the issues you raised. > Someone would just take the plans exactly as listed, purchase the material as listed, and not one question ever would be raised? I would never trust a construction team that didn’t raise questions if not even to see if they themselves could skimp on material to pocket the difference. You’re right, the contractor would likely catch the design issues if there were any, and possibly before that in the plan review/permitting process if the AHJ is on the ball. I work in the electrical trade and I (and my electricians) find and correct errors frequently in engineered plans. We tell the engineer if it costs us more money to attempt to get a contract change order, but we keep it to ourselves if we can do it safely for cheaper. A common scenario I run into is a design with oversized feeders where you can use a smaller wire and still meet code, we just pull the smaller conductors and pocket the difference (assuming you bid the project using the larger wire size)