For classic engineering it's been a boon. This is in a pretty similar vein to the gains mathematicians have been making with AI.

These models can pretty reliably bang out what once was long mathematical solves for hypothetical systems in incredibly short periods of time. It also enables you to do second and third order approximations way easier. What was a first order approach that would take a day, is now a second order approach taking an hour.

And to top it off, they're also pretty damn competent in at least pointing you in the right direction (if nothing else) for getting information about adjacent areas you need to understand.

I've been doing an electro-optical project recently as an electronics guys, and LLMs have been infinitely useful in helping with the optics portion (on top of the mathing electronics speed up).

It's still "trust, but verify" for sure, but damn, it's powerful.

▲ Incipient 12 hours ago | parent [-]

If the AI is pointing you in a direction, how much creativity is lost through the mathematician no longer doing that?

I genuinely feel AI makes the ability to come up with approaches worse in software dev.

	▲	gritspants 11 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I probe Claude on occasion when I don't feel like looking up source documentation. A couple weeks ago, I was interrogating it about a system that happened to use Kafka. Last night, I was asking it to propose an entirely different solution and it kept trying to shoe horn Kafka into it. I asked it why and proposed a simpler alternative. I was absolutely right! Claude was just very eager to demonstrate familiarity with other systems I was working on! I shudder to think of the things people will wind up shipping blindly accepting AI guidance.
	▲	ayuoo9 12 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Reminds me of this quote: `To presume to point a man to the right and ultimate goal — to point with a trembling finger in the RIGHT direction is something only a fool would take upon himself. - Hunter S. Thompson`