Calculators and CAD tools do not give you non-deterministic answers. Both of them simply automate part of the manual work for them without creating anything "new". I haven't used CAD tools but I did use some level editors such as Trenchbroom -- I think what is automated is the 3d shapes that you want to make -- e.g. back in the day of '96, when ID Software is creating Quake, there was very little pre-drawn shapes in the level editor and they have to make the blocks by themselves, thus it is very difficult and time consuming to make complex shapes such as curved walls and tunnels. Then better tools were invented and now it is much easier to create a complex shape. But you don't type "a Quake level with theme A, and blah blah" and then you get a more or less working level -- this is what AI is doing right now.

I think the right analogy to calculators and CAD tools, is IDE with Intellisense for SWE -- instead of typing code one char by one char, we can tab to automate some part of it.

But I agree with your consensus -- SWE is changing, whether we like it or not. We need to adapt, or find a niche and grit to retirement.

> non-deterministic answers

It doesn't make sense to get hung up on this aspect of LLMs. We prefer non deterministic so far because it tends to work slightly better even if it is completely possible to ask for a temperature=0 deterministic answer.

With more scale and research, at some point you'll get results that are both useful and deterministic, if it's not already the case.