None of the things you list in the "other half" are out of reach for AI.

Also: disagree about the lack of validation loop:

   a) AI can actually build one for you in many cases

   b) if you give agents an actual validation toolkit, you'll be surprised what AI can do

Of course, if you expect to prompt "give me a NURBS model of a complete, working v8 motor" and get a result, then yeah, sure, we're not there yet.

I've actually built a bunch of stuff with a combo of astra, blender, openscad and tiny bits of AI written helpers ... giving the AI the proper "hands" to work with the models is key.

One particularly useful tool to provide the AI with is to be able to "look" at the model as it iterates on it (measure dimensions, shoot arbitrary rays at it that return exact intersections and normals, see if the object obeys engineering constraints, etc ...).

Works pretty well for many, many things and saves a TON of time.

▲ jrflo 7 hours ago | parent [-]

AI cannot physically build anything in the real world, what are you referring to? That's a huge part of mechanical engineering.

And you can give it simulation tools, but those are far far away from accounting for everything in real-world physics. You can simulate very tightly constrained problems, but you can't simulate "assemble this actuator and test it", there are so many more variables in the real world that are not easy to account for in a simulation.

If you aren't an engineer that works on physical products, it's hard to articulate just how far from reality CAD and simulations are.

	▲	matchstickman23 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This is how LLMs have been since the beginning. They can be really okay at the most surface level information, but as soon as you dig any bit beyond that, it all falls apart. Inquire any chatbot about something that you're an expert in and it becomes quickly apparent. I'm here for using LLMs to take some of the tedium out of product design/mechanical engineering, but I just haven't seen a good proof of concept yet. It always seems to be some variation of "Design a sphere. Oh wow, this is incredible!"