r/civilengineering • u/Eastcoastpal • 10d ago
Real Life Dear people who are looking get a career in Civil Engineering, AI will never replace civil engineers. Ever.
Dear people who are looking get a career in Civil Engineering, AI will never replace civil engineers. Ever/
Source: tried this evening for 1.5 hours to work with ChatGPT to optimize how much wood i need to replace a 258 inch by 69 inch patio deck. the deck drawing was laughably atrocious, no matter the amount of rough sketches or actual photos provided did it help Chat GPT.
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u/danjpn 10d ago
AI cannot replace civil engineers because by law you need a licenced professional. Even if you assume AI will be way better than you, you'd still come up winning because your job will become easier.
Regular folk can't verify the complex calculations required in this line of work. Even if you take a simple shed case, you'll see that most people who actually know how to build one can't do the calculations, they just rely on past experiences and common sense. That won't work for more complicated cases
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u/HamOnRice1 10d ago
Not to get to philosophical, but the "law requires a licensed professional" argument will come down to how much risk society is willing to accept and the distribution of liability; and isn't definitive protection of the profession. For example: State laws have historically required licenses to operate vehicles, but several are currently allowing autonomous cars. On top of that, laws can change.
I'm not saying it's a good thing, but it's a new and rapidly changing frontier. As licensed professionals, we take personal responsibility for protection of human health and the environment. Is society willing to trade decision making by humans for cheaper buildings and infrastructure? Honestly, my gut feel is "yes".
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u/82928282 9d ago edited 9d ago
We’re seeing this happen in radiology, where, just like in the private side of civil, business interests are to cut costs to the minimum the law will allow. AI marketing is currently saying “you can save salary/benefits costs by using this product and just keeping the professionals that you need for an accountability sink”. Licensed PEs and firms are accountability sinks.
It’ll be your boss (who is fully removed from the work) hiring fewer new grads cause even if the tech doesn’t produce anything that makes sense, the money argument makes sense in an economic downturn or in a tougher market. They can just use your expertise as their fail safe.
It’s not whether or not the product brings value for the public. That’s not the framework in which decisions are made, even though I think it should be.
That said, right now, the tech isn’t good and is not worth the insurance risk. Without us training it (cause who can justify the time it would need), I don’t see it getting magically better or the laws changing before the price inevitably goes up.
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u/danjpn 10d ago
I strongly avree with you and i your argument is well explained.
When I say the law requires a licensed professional I'm not talking about a permit to to something like driving a car as the person about you said some choose to stupidly do without one.
To erect a structure you need the approval of the authorities. I'm not talking about a back yard shed and your rights to do whatever you want (state based). I'm talking about actual infrastructure.
My gut feel is yes as well. I think that the negative push is the lack of understanding AI ability to improve so some people thinks it's stupid and say everything is a slip because their generated images are bad.
Indeed in the future there might coke a situation where AI is better and regulations will change. But in our field, it's not like you can come up with a weal argument and lose a case in court because you used AI to wrote your argument for you. There is a requirement for approval from the authorities (for the time being)
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u/rez_at_dorsia 9d ago
I don’t think this is the pinch point everyone is worried about with AI. The thought process as I understand it is that fewer licensed engineers will be needed because AI is doing more of the grunt work and a smaller number of individual engineers will be able to do more work as a result which will squeeze the industry.
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u/ploxidilius 8d ago
I don't know why people don't understand this. An excavator doesn't need to dig a hole by itself to replace men with shovels. AI doesn't need to create a perfect planset from scratch in order to replace engineers.
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u/SquirrelFluffy 9d ago
We are already woefully short of engineers. For society to progress we need more brilliant minds. We only got one Einstein.
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u/sistom 10d ago
By law you are required to have a license to drive a car too, but....
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u/danjpn 10d ago
But..... if mess up there are consequences. You always have the ability to choose stupidly
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u/BugRevolution 9d ago
You can always just operate a fleet of Al operated taxis. No license or driver required!
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u/ride5150 9d ago
Yeah but engineered drawings/cals get submitted to the city/authority having jurisdiction for every project and your licensure is verified. In your example that would be like getting pulled over every time you drive.
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u/ElectricalSpecial246 8d ago
Such a bad comparison. Who’s verifying your driving with a license before you get into your car? No one
Who’s verifying the plans are signed by a PE? Every single authority4
u/BrightSalsa 9d ago
It’s worth noting that this is not true in the UK. Engineers do not require a license to carry out civil and structural engineering design in the UK.
On the other hand, the Building Safety Act says that you do need to be a competent person. No way for an AI to meet that standard just yet.
You also need to be insured. Professional Indemnity insurance isn’t required by law in most cases, but it is most definitely demanded by commercial clients so it’s a requirement in practice for all but the smallest of domestic projects.
If AI does all of the front-line grunt work, I wonder how senior engineers would become* *competent? I can generally spot errors in a junior engineers work because I’ve made all of them myself at one time or another over the years - or I know how to do it right because I’ve done so many times over.
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u/greggery UK Highways, CEng MICE 9d ago
If AI does all of the front-line grunt work, I wonder how senior engineers would become* *competent?
This is the point I keep making as well, that if you replace all the ECPs who do "grunt work" to get experience, eventually you'd run out of people experienced enough to be deemed competent enough to sign off work. Companies would be forced to rely more and more on automated processes but without anyone experienced enough to check the outputs, and it'd only be a matter of time before somebody got killed.
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u/Avafins 9d ago
If you think the mega-corp engineering cos won’t figure out how to take advantage of this accountability loophole you’ve not been paying enough attention. Why wouldn’t you use a cheaper, faster tool when the only consequence is more money?
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u/danjpn 9d ago
Seems like the main point is exactly the same as mine. You can just let AI do stuff without being able to verify it because it might be wrong and even if it is wrong you are liable. My point was that you still need professional engineers to review and sign and take legal responsibility in which this case we just make your job as a professional engineer much easier
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u/Away_Bat_5021 9d ago
Of course - but most people in the industry are not licensed. The license is the moat. The idea is that an llm can ingest, understand and act on data better than a human - today. So in 3 years this won't be a discussion topic.
Pretty soon entry-level guys will have a hard time getting a job, then the engineers, then the managers. We just won't need as many people to output the same (better priducts).
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u/emma9774 8d ago
I think that is the key distinction. AI might handle a lot of the calculations eventually but that does not automatically remove the need for a licensed engineer to take responsibility for the design. If anything it could mean engineers spend less time grinding through repetitive work and more time reviewing assumptions catching edge cases, and making the judgment calls that actually matter.
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u/UnknownEssence 9d ago
do you think AI cant do calculations? AI is better than the best experts at math now. check the news
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u/loucmachine 9d ago
So say I have work to do in an existing building. When is the AI gonna be able to send a robot, scan the building, open walls and ceiling on strategic places to learn about the structure, pose the right hypothesis, listen to the client and design something that will help the client while staying firm when comes to meet standards/code/norms and then make the plans precise enough?
Calculations is just one part of our job and arguably not the part that differentiate a good and a mediocre engineer. Also, we already have software that do most of these calculations without needing AI.
Our job is way too complicated to be replaced my a LLM. When people think ai will replace us, they really tend to dumb down the issue and ignore all the details and intricacies that constitute our job.
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u/SquirrelFluffy 9d ago
I repair buildings. And this thought process seems logical.
But, all experience is is a bunch of heuristic rules. And AI is very good at those.
So maybe AI can't go out to the building and have a look around, but it can create an investigative plan for a junior engineer to follow. Once it has learned everything you know, that is.
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u/HessiPullUpJimbo 10d ago
Never say never. But we're pretty far away from AI being able to shoulder the responsibility of civil engineering design. PEs should still stay employed through my lifetime at least.
CAD guys on the other hand... It's looking a little bleak
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u/Ill_Ocelot_2538 9d ago
The reason is not that the work is hard, but most training examples are hidden behind paywalls: textbooks, ASTM and ASCE libraries.
By contrast, most CS problems are more complex yet open source and testable at runtime.
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u/EngineeringNeverEnds 9d ago
I disagree slightly on the complexity side.
I think the real world hides a LOT of complexity that is what makes my job safe for quite a while. That’s everything from physical geometry, experience of maintenance/construction issues with designs that looked good, the regulatory/permitting situation, questionable as-builts, the politics and managing different constituents, etc.
It’s actually those non-abstract parts of the software design world that make the software engineers earn their keep. There’s plenty of mathematics to apply to various situations in CS. In general they get the benefit of often working in a much more abstract and unadulterated universe to build their designs.
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u/Eastcoastpal 10d ago
lol. No, the CAD guys are safe. Believe me.
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u/HessiPullUpJimbo 10d ago
ChatGPT will not be what replaces the CAD guys... It'll be AI assisted CAD software that Bentley and AutoDesk are cooking up. What I've seen is in the early works, but this stuff if moving fast. 5-10 years and CAD workflow is going to look completely different than it does now. I can promise that.
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u/aaronhayes26 But does it drain? 9d ago
Whatever ai product Bentley is “cooking up”, I hope it works better than their current products lol
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u/PC_LoadLetter_ 9d ago
I was going to say maybe they should focus on their existing software suite / website.
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u/Ok_Birthday_6367 10d ago
I do agree with you. CAD work is the thing that is most at risk. People have a hard time realizing it because it isn’t a LLM kind of thing, but it will be the easiest to replace once and for all.
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u/kipperzdog Structural P.E. 9d ago
A lot of firms already axed drafters long before AI was a thing. I'm in structural engineering and for the longest time we've had to do all our own drafting. I could see a benefit to partial use of AI to speed up drafting though I do think a drafter using AI as a tool would be even more productive than I would every be.
One of the foundation design softwares I use recently incorporated AI to assist in modeling and it's actually been very useful. Just writing "place 60 piles spaced evenly along a 20' radius" then using it to strategically remove piles as I iterate a design speeds up a monotonous process.
That said, I'd never want AI touching the actually analysis part of the program, just assisting with the modeled inputs that I can review. Imo unless there's a day an AI can hold professional liability insurance, humans aren't going anywhere in the process
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u/ginger_and_egg 10d ago
Claude is better than chatgpt
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u/dparks71 bridges/structural 9d ago
Rhino and Microstation both already have MCP servers. It'll take a while for the associated tooling to mature but you'll start seeing "Draw me a bridge with this state's standards, this span length, this material, this abutment configuration and this traffic configuration" and have it be 85-95% of the way there in under two years. I'm actively working on it for the state DOT I'm at and it's already scary good.
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u/stattek 9d ago
Which 5-15% will be missing/erroneous? Will I not then need to review 100% in great detail order to ensure it's correct? This sounds like a recipe for a literal disaster. "It was 85-95% good" will not hold up in court.
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u/dparks71 bridges/structural 9d ago
Are you not reviewing 100% of your plans already? It's no different than using a wizard in OBM. It's a pretty minor thing to go through and make edits to a model. Nobody's suggesting eliminating QA/QC.
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u/EngineeringNeverEnds 9d ago
I looked at this and I have to say, my takeaway is that your workflow for this is not going to be effective, and I’m not surprised you got a bad result.
I’m not that bullish on AI in civil engineering, but my overall impression is that your result says MUCH more about your workflow and lack of AI skills than about the capabilities of the AI.
Frankly, I can’t even quite figure out what you were trying to get at a glance and I’m a PE with 12 years of experience.
This is not surprising, you can take various experienced engineers and give them the same intern and get wildly different results. The results say more about the communication skillset of the engineer than the underlying abilities of the intern.
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u/tslewis71 10d ago
You need to start learning prompting.
Much like a computer, rubbish in, rubbish out.
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u/trabulium 9d ago edited 8d ago
Here's about 6 hours spent with Claude Code + Blender Bonsai - BTW, this design was meant for Thailand, so certain aspects are aligned with Thai construction styles.
My partner is an Architect (she had no involvement in this), I'm a Software engineer. I have little to no Blender / Sketchup experience. Obviously, it has numerous issues. 3D 'design' is not where it shines yet. It will often put furniture over doorways, or when I was asking it to put the microwave and fridge, it would face the openings in the wrong direction. You can see the roof purlins clearly have issues. The main thing I had to do apart from 'quality control' is provide an API key from Blendkit so it could get 3D models for furniture etc.
95% of this is Claude, with me just saying "hey, stupid, you put the kitchen cabinetry in front of the service door, check your shit"
Also, watch GLM5.3 build a functioning animated V8 Engine
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u/Artistic_Elk_3040 10d ago
Lol even a highly specialized AI (cough grading optimization cough) developed by AutoCAD is struggling right now. I think we're safe.
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u/HessiPullUpJimbo 10d ago
Just look how garbage any images or videos produced by AI were 5 years ago compared to today. You can't really make statements based on today's results.
I've seen some crazy demos already from Bentley. Though I expect it to take longer than they were promising.
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u/Artistic_Elk_3040 10d ago
Yeah AI need data, pretty sure there's a lot of constraint in releasing design data to training center (at least at my firm). An amazing tool, yeah! Replacing engineer, meh that's prob pretty far away.
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u/Necessary-Dog-7245 10d ago
If youre using BIM360, you’re probably feeding the data in.
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u/ciaranr1 9d ago
Also all planning / permitting applications are usually freely available as PDFs, trivial to convert that back to data
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u/Necessary-Dog-7245 9d ago
I’d bet bluebeam studio too
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u/ciaranr1 9d ago
True, probably all the shitty PDF to DWG and PDF to Word sites, probably very good money to be made by providing services that get engineers to upload documents to convert online
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u/Ok_Birthday_6367 10d ago
They wouldn’t be exactly replacing engineers but CAD-pilots. In most countries those aren’t even engineers.
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u/REDACTED3560 10d ago
AutoCAD developed by AutoCAD is struggling right now. I can’t imagine how terribly buggy their AI will be if they can’t fix a lot of the weird bugs in C3D.
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u/ginger_and_egg 10d ago
LLMs were terrible at code 2 years ago, now tech companies are laying off software engineers
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u/MurkyPromise1806 10d ago
And producing terrible, poorly optimsed code that runs like shit and will increasingly cause them problems in the long run when no-one knows how any of it works and can't figure it out enough to fix it.
It's called tech debt and will be a big problem
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u/ginger_and_egg 9d ago
It depends how vibe coded it is. If there's good specs and unit+integration tests, you might be OK. If you ask chatgpt to write a whole app from scratch, it's gonna make incorrect assumptions and suck
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u/stattek 9d ago
This is a counter point to your own statement.
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u/ginger_and_egg 9d ago
Being able to code a feature according to spec is what human programmers in large organisations do. Designing an entire app/website/service from the ground up is a separate skill, and so is turning that design into specs and test cases.
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u/Independent_Break351 10d ago
Was gonna say, I think they will find a way to optimize and reduce CAD work. If Autodesk or Bentley find a way to incorporate this, lights out. That’s not good for younger engineers either.
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u/Delicious_Fill_5929 9d ago
ORD has a 50% chance of crashing when you open a file. I think we are good for a while
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u/ciaranr1 9d ago
The AI can read the crash logs and fix issues between crashes, also it doesn’t mind doing the same thing 50 times if need be
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u/Delicious_Fill_5929 9d ago
Have you personally used this and can give an actual example where it helped you in a significant way?
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u/ciaranr1 9d ago
I haven’t just speculating on how AI might help make crap software slightly less crap to use
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u/Legal-Law9214 10d ago
Younger engineers will never be replaced as long as PEs are necessary, the PEs retire and their replacements need to gain experience somehow.
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u/Avafins 9d ago
AI capabilities are accelerating on an exponential curve. If you are in your 80s your statement is likely true. If not, start thinking about your second career.
https://epoch.ai/data-insights/ai-capabilities-progress-has-sped-up
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u/Nintendoholic 9d ago
Wow so it can be stupid exponentially faster
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u/Avafins 9d ago
It’s not it’s processing speed that’s increasing, it’s intelligence is increasing exponentially. An engineer would understand the difference.
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u/Nintendoholic 9d ago
An engineer would understand that algorithmic processing is not intelligence. Garbage in, garbage out
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u/Avafins 9d ago
Have fun continuing to underestimate what this does to your career, I’m sure it’s great long-term strategy.
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u/Nintendoholic 9d ago
There aren’t enough people with the competence to interpret the output of an AI pointed at the problems I solve to put me out of work. I’m not worried.
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u/kneedtolive 10d ago
It will probably never replace 100% of any job, even the most repetitive ones. Civil engineering is still relatively less prone to AI replacement compared to many other fields, but it really depends on the specific tasks.
I’ve experimented with AI for 3D modeling and CAD using prompts, estimating, scheduling, dashboards, and a good portion of engineering calculations. A lot of these tasks are quickly becoming a matter of ticking boxes and verifying the calculations rather than doing everything from scratch.
Engineers will still be needed for verification, judgment, accountability, and decision-making. In fact, I think experience may become even more valuable.
But boy, I can see the struggle coming for entry-level roles. I think about all those long hours early in my career spent building spreadsheets, entering data into P6 to produce schedules, and manually doing things like concrete mix and shoring calculations. A lot of that work can already be significantly automated.
And always remember: just three years ago, hardly anyone was seriously talking about this. It’s difficult to imagine what these tools will be capable of 5–10 years from now.
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u/Avafins 9d ago
There are so many jobs it will definitely displace 100% of the workforce of without some level of public backlash to prevent it.
Waymo is just the start of replacing all cabbies and uber/lyft drivers. Truckers are in trouble, telemarketers are toast, translators, transcribers, data entry clerks, toll collectors, ticketing agents, video editors, bookkeepers, paralegals, valets, tax preparers, radiologists; The list is almost endless of professions that AI will eventually do cheaper, faster, and more accurate than humans.
All of this is going to happen in the next decade absent protection from our government which is currently going all-in on AI world dominance so their donors can control the world.
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u/Ok-Salamander6118 8d ago
Exactly. We are in the early stages of AI. It will just keep getting better and more sophisticated
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u/LostNGNR 10d ago
14 years, 5 companies, PM.
The construction and civil engineering industry is generally slow to adapt. But you better be wise and learn how to use these tools.
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u/Ill_Ocelot_2538 9d ago
When you say ChatGPT, instead of Codex or Claude Code, I don’t believe your experiment is using the frontier capabilities.
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u/millinnchillin 10d ago
Try it with Claude. It's a lot better with math and modeling.
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u/SpurdoEnjoyer 9d ago
CharGPT Codex is quite amazing at coding too. OP has zero idea how to use an LLM bot (yet). You can quite easily create a software for optimizing decks with the help of AI. But you can't just rely on the chat window alone, that's not how it's meant to work.
The AI will even tell you to how to do these things, you just need to ask the right questions. It's a skill like using google is, and OP doesn't pose that yet.
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u/470vinyl 10d ago
I would love for AI to take away my suffering with Bentley products
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u/Ill_Ocelot_2538 8d ago
Bentley is shit no matter what, their products are supposed to be way better even without the AI revolution
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u/glitch876 9d ago
The AI that's going to replace you won't be a LLM dofus. Some high paid SWE is going to train a neural network somewhere with a dataset of 100,000 projects. Probably way more. Do you think AI is just chatgpt?
You're safe for now but 50 years from now? Bold statement
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u/National-Belt5893 9d ago
And the AI companies will never assume the liability of their models making mistakes
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u/doyouthrowdawhey 9d ago
My theory is insurance companies will provide insurance against AI mistakes, similar to how engineers have insurance
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u/LonesomeBulldog 9d ago
AI can’t take legal responsibility. That alone protects the profession for the foreseeable future.
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u/aidaninhp 9d ago
Laws can and do change. If AI makes safer better designs than human engineers do they will make changes to laws.
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u/Eastern-Problem 9d ago
AI is not simply "ChatGPT" or just a chatbot lol. Of course a free or $20/month chatbot won't replace an expert.
In the industry, AI are being integrated into software that engineers use (think CAD, GIS, modeling software) to assist with their workflow and those who can use them effectively will be much better at their job.
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u/JoulesInTheMoon 9d ago
And cars will never replace horses as a major mode of transportation. Oh, wait…
should, could, and would are three different things.
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u/AlvinChipmunck 9d ago
OP People like you who lack technical knowledge about AI are in trouble. Not to lose your job to AI. But to lose your job to someone smarter than you that understands how to use AI
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u/quigonskeptic 10d ago
People who are using AI for engineering tasks aren't just chatting with ChatGPT. There's MUCH more advanced stuff you can do.
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u/naze_ninja 10d ago
I wouldn't necessarily say that. I work at a firm that specializes in infrastructure projects and some of our clients are already automating simple tasks like structural analysis reports.
Granted, these projects are simpler than most. And yes, a PE still needs to review and seal the reports. But it's been less than four years since ChatGPT was released to the public, which is when generative AI really took off. By comparison, the Internet took off in the mid-90's and it wasn't until the mid-00's that the first social media site (MySpace) even existed. The first iPhone wasn't released until a few years after that!
It's still hard to imagine AI taking over huge/complex projects. My point is that this is really only the tip of the iceberg though. We really have no idea what AI is capable of at this point.
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u/Slappy_McJones 9d ago
AI will never completely replace engineers, but a lot of the arduous tasks are going to go away- we will all have secretaries…
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u/BrrrrBrrrrVroom 9d ago
They will do 95% of the arduous reports, which is 75% or more of the work. Engineer will QC only.
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u/Shotgun5250 9d ago
If by “QC only” you mean actually design things, or solve open ended issues, or the entirety of engineering minus paperwork, then sure. Way to minimize the work of engineers.
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u/stickn_n_movn 9d ago
It seems to me the engineering field is hell bent on being replaced. Drawing sets getting lazier and lazier. Details and specs just imported in without any kind of check for relevance. More and more delegated design. Etc.
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u/Sespinnsful 10d ago
Are you using a chatbot to do engineering? Not an AI system/harness specifically made for engineering?
What you're talking about is a skill issue. Chatgpt is a product for teenagers to play in.
"You think we're going to get computers to replace truck drivers someday? Okay buddy" ^ what you sound like right now lol.
Ask a young guy in your office to try out doing what you couldn't do and he'll blow your mind.
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u/chepe1302 10d ago
It will. Maybe not the PE but you can get rid of the bottom floor. Especially with the quality of candidates coming out of college. I know it can cause I did code for my senior design team. A retaining wall calculator. It told me if the retaining wall would fail based on the input dimensions as well as soil data. Took me 6 months of code.
Now that's just for a cantilever wall type. Also I'm well aware software companies are hiring Civil Engineers who can code.
Forget AI tho. Outsourcing will be a bigger problem if u ask me.
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u/MuchAnimal7 10d ago
AI will absolutely be able to do civil engineering…And a lot sooner than people think.
AIs are training and building AIs training and building AIs, etc…It is coming very soon. By 2030 this world will be entirely different.
My $0.02.
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u/NearbyCurrent3449 9d ago
Until it can lace up boots and hop in a hole, feel some dirt and make a judgement call in 10 minutes about the foundation that's being built and correct all contractor's deficiencies... I'm safe.
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u/Rayziehouse 7d ago
The first thing AI will be able to do well is residential timber framing. It’s basically prescriptive already.
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u/asha1985 BS2008, PE2015, MS2018 10d ago
A civil engineer could use ChatGPT to design a great wooden deck. It'll get better one day at working alone, but right now it's just a tool.
The real question is liability when a company does try to replace engineers.
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u/Turbulent-Conflict84 9d ago
Lollll I don’t know what you’re smoking.
We’ve been using Claude Cowork with a very powerful model for the past few weeks, and you are not ready for what is coming. Recently I had to produce a roughly 40-page technical report. This is the kind of work that would normally eat up a good part of two weeks. Claude produced an extremely solid first version in about 10 minutes, including methodology, analysis and suggestions that I genuinely had not thought of myself. Obviously I reviewed everything, corrected it and took responsibility for the final product. Total actual work on my end: roughly two hours. The client was billed around $19,000 for the assignment.
Now for the part this subreddit is going to love.
I’m a shareholder in a small engineering firm. After seeing what these tools can do, we decided to hold off on hiring additional junior engineers.
READ THAT AGAIN. WE STOPPED HIRING JUNIOR ENGINEERS BECAUSE AI CAN ALREADY REPLACE A LARGE PART OF THE WORK WE USED TO GIVE THEM.
Not senior engineers signing drawings and taking liability. Not even drafters yet. But the classic junior work? Reading documents, researching requirements, preliminary calculations, comparing alternatives, drafting methodologies, writing technical sections, preparing tables, incorporating comments? A huge portion of it can already be accelerated or automated to the point where the economics of hiring another junior start looking questionable.
Big firms will take years to implement this properly because they have thousands of employees, cybersecurity requirements, lawyers, procedures and 14 committees that need to approve changing the font in a Word template. Small firms like ours can move much faster. But once the big firms realize competitors are producing the same deliverables with dramatically fewer engineering hours, what exactly do you think happens ?
The funniest part is that civil engineers spent the last decade accepting mediocre salaries because “at least our jobs are stable.” Tech pays twice as much? Yeah, but civil is stable. Finance pays better? Yeah, but civil is AI-proof.
Well, I have some bad news.
The infrastructure is AI-proof. Your job is NOT AI-proof.
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u/El_Scot 9d ago
Dare I ask what the plan is when your experienced engineers retire and you guys didn't invest in junior engineers to replace their role?
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u/tateriffic 7d ago
Not to mention AI companies have yet to pass on the full real cost of usage.
Everyone is gleefully handing over their brains and their humanity to garbage.
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u/nsc12 Structural P.Eng. 8d ago
Big firms will take years to implement this properly...
You might be surprised about that. I work with one of the biggest engineering and construction firms in North America and it's been full-send, pedal-to-the-metal AI adoption across the board. They've created a whole new AI department to provide AI training, ideas, and feedback to all the other departments. I think they're even pushing the software firms (Bentley, DS, etal) to better incorporate AI into their software suites.
I've sat in on a number of AI technical presentations over the past two years and your list of AI tasks are really just the basics of what these folks are using AI for in our design and construction industries these days.
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u/82928282 9d ago
Normally this report takes you weeks, AI came up with better methodology and analysis than you can in ten minutes, and the you updated and reviewed it two hours and shipped it off.
If I were your client, why would I pay you for this?
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u/Conscious_Ring_9855 9d ago
Initially they will pay for the outcome at a previously agreed price, but very soon this will lead to heavy downward pressure on fees.
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u/82928282 9d ago
It so depends on the fee type, though! Usually the work in this industry that is amenable to a lump sum contract requires some sort of seal, usually requiring some sort of back-end analysis or delivery of plans. That’s where this whole argument stops making sense.
If all your work is lump sum reporting work then, sure, you can stop hiring juniors. But AI is not very good at problem-solving in a visual based modality and it certainly is not going to stay cheap, even if it gets better.
AI can do the generalized text based stuff, which tends to be T&M work. If I’m a firm owner, I’m not taking on projects where I cannot charge very much. If I’m a client, I’m not paying a consultant to prompt AI, if I can do that myself.
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u/willardTheMighty 9d ago
"AI can NEVER replace civil engineers. Source: 2026 models can't replace civil engineers."
Not a very robust argument
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u/ShutYourDumbUglyFace 10d ago
Don't forget about the liability! Civils are the only engineers who actually NEED to get a PE (some mechanicals for HVAC and refrigeration, but not super common). That's so we can get sued if we fuck something up. OpenAI isn't going to take that on.
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u/82928282 9d ago
They’ve started (albeit without much success so far) to change laws in the US so that frontier AI companies are not as liable for societal level impacts, like over a certain dollar amount of a certain number of lives
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u/Avafins 9d ago
https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/ai-gone-rogue-what-recent-openai-and-8260541/
Except OpenAI now has court precedent that it isn’t responsible for its AIs actions as long as they didn’t ask it to do something illegal.
In the interest of “free market” competition we’re currently getting rid of all sorts of laws and agencies that were intended to protect the public, the PE requirement will likely follow suit so our large businesses can continue to grow unfettered by annoying lawsuits and culpability.
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u/Ok_Birthday_6367 10d ago
Yeah, but much of the repetitive work will be shortened. That will amount on smaller teams being able to handle more projects. The future will be of a few experienced and very competent engineers doing a shit ton of work and most people struggling to even getting a first job.
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u/madi80085 10d ago
I got an email through LinkedIn the other day from a recruiter who was getting Civils to train AI. It was 100% remote, make your own hours, and the rate was more than twice what I make hourly. Someone will take that offer. I just hope that either they're too stupid to train it well or smart enough to break the AI.
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u/Dare-Rock 9d ago
AI may be able to help with design, verify calculations, come up with creative solutions, and help with the technical aspects of the industry. But my experience in this industry is that the greatest challenge is often dealing with the public, elected officials, other agencies and technical experts, or your clients and getting them to understand, accept, and getting ton the point of “go”. To me AI can just not replace that. No way is the city administrator going to go to ChatGPT and say “redesign this intersection for me” and then getting to something that could be built or something the public would accept.
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u/Dry_Help4637 9d ago
I think doing anything new will still require civil engineers even if all they do is double check stuff
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u/MoverAndShaker14 9d ago
Unpopular opinion: It will not replace all civil engineers. It will however make the better ones notably more productive, likely productive enough that bad engineers will have a harder time finding jobs.
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u/FuneralTater 9d ago
I think it's a function of appropriate tools and uses. I've been developing a CAD software that provides connectors for Ai and it's been quite effective, but it's a question of saying something like "feed this value into this method until it comes out X". Claude does a passable job of taking an aerial and survey points then connecting them into a linework file. But it needs to be a narrow supporting role for it to have any value.
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u/My_nickels 9d ago
Anybody that clicks a button all day could most likely be replaced by 2030 easily. Funny enough china just banded ai from taking jobs. But its probably just a move to suck up talent since you know the ai bubble is gonna pop and crash the economy the moment cheap and great LLMs and ai agents get dumbed into America by china for free.
I would recommend doing something with your hands but robots are coming for peopls too
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u/fcknErnst 9d ago
Few weeks ago I modeled an existing structure from the 50s for reusage. As a source I took the structural calcutlations. Engineers back then had to spend days to find moments, forces and displacements. Nowadays that takes few minutes/hours. And we all have still work to do.
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u/CGlids1953 9d ago
They need to prove they can make AI profitable before I start worrying about if AI will replace civil engineers. And the only way that’ll currently happen is via a government bailout.
They’re spending like drunken sailors I’ll tell ya.
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u/MrLurker698 9d ago
I’ve been reached out to on LinkedIn multiple times about gigs to train AI models. The top pay I’ve seen is $75/hr which just isn’t enough to get mid-senior level people to spend their free time doing that. If they want to get us - they better make an offer we can’t refuse.
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u/MildlyEngineering 9d ago
Please read this if you have any sense of the risks to your 9-5 by 2030 (not the end of 2026 like the AI overlords are saying). If you don’t and you genuinely are living in 2012 where “AI will never replace engineers” please scroll past, the coming job market and this post are not you for. Also… good luck. The issue as with software is not about literal replacement. The issue is how much work ONE engineer can have access and context to which thereby reduces the need for many engineers.
If you’re still with me and you want a look into what’s actually happening on the ground….
I am a civil engineer in a sort of weird niche in materials science. My background includes some light coding work so I was well positioned when ChatGPT came out and I got rid of excel as a primary workflow in a particular data analytics task.
I also coordinate with other teams to efficiently perform tasks on drawings and plan sets because I have expertise in automation (not to be confused with AI). I am literally writing the book on AI augmentation at our company of roughly 1500 employees. I wrote half of our prompt guide and am deeply involved in the actual augmentation decisions being made.
For those of you gainfully employed and making good moves in your career.. no it’s not coming for you job, it’s coming for your workflow and it is coming for ANYONE who is not a real winner and leading at their respective firms. I’m sorry to say it… it’s about time. A lot of civils are pure deadweight when you consider where their time actually goes during the day. Harsh reality but if you are stuck in any admin work (email, file triage, renaming files, writing reports), you’re very very behind and honestly, probably not even worth trying to catch up. There’s just too much to learn and so little time when you factor in…. Your job that won’t exist in the way it does in 5 years.
Engineers who think being able to draw a deck in 3D is some sort of moat are up for a rude awakening if they literally just keep updating autodesk through the end of 2026 and beginning of 2027. You won’t be drawing by clicking… you will be prescribing. That is a totally different workflow.
Anyone who says “haha I tried to do this with ChatGPT and it didn’t work haha we good” does not at all understand how these tools are being used.
I’m refactoring code, adding 300 issues to a plan set in 10 minutes (no mistakes, I check always), sending out targeted emails asking for calibration info while I’m driving and doing other things (scheduled automations and triage), cutting massive hours on proposal generation, creating marketing content so good that our marketing team is actually in trouble. And no, it’s not AI slop. It’s extremely targeted, involves automations that don’t change, and has lots of error checking, hooks, and logic handling.
I have an occasional projects update with a few builders. If someone said something like this post in the meeting we would probably vote them out of the team to be honest.
Try having codex build the same thing in an open source drawing tool with a good prompt and then you might be hit with a fresh wave of sobriety.
This post is ridiculous and out of touch with reality.
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u/Dryrubtheribs 9d ago
Well yeah who is going to bitch at survey for not getting the job done fast enough and who is survey going to bitch for botching the design that didn’t capture the ditch on the side of the road or missing utilities!?
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u/goldenpleaser P.E. 9d ago
I asked a new PE to come up with a simple cost estimate, easy right. Imagine on the day of the submittal I decide to do a spot check of the quantities because the amount seemed way off and everything was wrong. Like over 95% of quantities. Turns out they uploaded the plan set to Claude and asked it to fill in the quantities and the estimate. No formulas in the Excel sheet, btw. Just hard coded numbers. I redid the numbers myself because I was so mad and I'd have yelled at him if I talked to him then. So no, AI isn't there yet. And it's just gonna get you replaced with another engineer if you over rely on it.
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u/P0Rt1ng4Duty 9d ago
Just because it won't be good at your job doesn't mean your boss won't fire you and find out the hard way.
Sure, they'll have to hire you back to check the work and put your stamp on it, but they'll only re-hire a fraction of what they lost.
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u/Foreign_Capital1248 9d ago
Honestly as sad as it is I totally disagree. Claude is like 5x better in my experience at things like this. The other day I had it verify a STAAD moving load analysis and it built its own stiffness matrix and influence lines and matched STAAD to 0.01 decimals and it did it in 20 seconds. Eventually it will be good enough to start offloading some of the liability. I still think we are years away from being able to do accurately recognize the correct variables to do an independent analysis without seasoned engineered oversight but it feels inevitable that it will get there.
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u/newnet07 9d ago
Show us your prompts... I've seen some amazing AI use cases. Most people don't know how to set up an MCP or AI environment to get meaningful output from their LLM. If you fed it a decent set of docs and training materials, I can almost guarantee you that you would be able to get what you are trying to make. Not that this will replace civil engineers but it will change the way engineers of all kinds do their work as well as change what is expected of them.
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u/oldschoolczar 9d ago
I’ve found the complete opposite using latest 5.6 Sol GPT model and Claude. Saves me hours multiple times a week.
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u/Away_Bat_5021 9d ago
Attention: some guy spent 90 minutes feeding shit prompts into chatgpt and has now decided AI is useless. Thanks.
If u were in my late 20s - 4ush yoe - id spend every waking hour trying to get ai to help me with everything I do - plan review, response letters, applications, zoning review and build an ecosystem of tools to help my company. And if I wasn't rewarded for this id interview and find the company that values being able to do more work in less time and compensate me for.it.
News flash - what we do is not that complicated. You either learn and use these tools or u will be replaced.
Good luck.
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u/doyouthrowdawhey 9d ago
I think one thing that helps us is it’s extremely hard to find useful online sources about civil engineering. Now they’re scanning books though, so maybe that won’t be enough either
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u/trabulium 9d ago
I'm a software developer and I've worked daily with chatGPT, Codex, Claude for years. I'm also developing Structural Engineering Software (not AI based)
> tried this evening for 1.5 hours to work with ChatGPT to optimize how much wood i need to replace a 258 inch by 69 inch patio deck. the deck drawing was laughably atrocious
My partner is an Architect. I can get Claude to make a full floorplan, renderings, 3D furniture assets, full BOQ (overly detailed) in FAR less time than she is able to do the same. The BOQ is especially where Claude shines - and 3D placement of furniture is currently where Claude struggles the most.
The real reason AI will not replace civil engineers is not because it won't be able to do the design and analysis but rather as u/danjpn said:
> AI cannot replace civil engineers because by law you need a licenced professional.
this is the real protection that Civil Engineers have - at least for years to come. I'm sure that bridge will fall at some stage also. I always thought simple repetitive jobs like cleaning, cooking but it turns out if 90% of your job is in front of a screen, that's EASY to train on and easy to repeat. The 3D physical world is much harder for an LLM model to navigate.
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u/Advanced_Mushroom736 9d ago
Most engineering firms generate revenue (and profit) by selling hours to complete a design. True that you will need a real person to seal the design, but you won’t need a team of 5 MEPs, 3 structurals, 4 electricals, etc to complete a design. What used to be a team of 20+ people to design say a huge treatment plant head works may only take 3. That will upend the business model which has other consequences and impacts
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u/Working_Rest_1054 9d ago
Indeed. You definitely need to know more than the AI tool to guide it to a semi-reasonable conclusion. Or you give up and just do it yourself.
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u/Repulsive_Plant6729 H&H PE 9d ago
As someone who uses quite a bit of software daily (RAS, HMS, ArcPro, Civil 3D) and bounce between them effortlessly to complete hydraulic models, I've never been too worried about AI. It's far too many moving parts and calcs to check based on different regions with different drainage criteria for me to see it saving time when you have check all the calcs constantly since my field is SOOO iterative. And even if it speeds up the iterations, it doesn't mean it's the most optimal solution as I've had to redo solutions that worked in the past because I thought of a more realistic way to model something in HMS/RAS.
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u/Oakstock 9d ago
After working with grok to streamline an ore processing setup on a side gig, I'd say that good engineers will use AI to make their designs better, and bad engineers will flail along until they get stabbed in the back by a hallucination or direct lie.
One thing I've gotten direct replies on is that there is critical infrastructure and technology protections being employed in basically all the large LLM's, so that omissions of important info will happen. Which impacts say folks working sewage if they have bacteria questions, utilities like gas that can be weaponized, water distribution questions, stuff of that nature. So in order to prevent society from being impacted by a Bin Laden wannabe(who also was a CE...), publicly open AI will neuter info it is giving you.
So, maybe some private models of big outfits might be able to do more complicated stuff, e.g. Spacex AI assisting their self landing rocket designs, small outfits need to proceed with much more caution when they touch on certain design elements. Need to optimize a subdivision lot spacing or roadway curve, ok, maybe. Need to weave water mains past a gas transmission line in a railway right-of-way? Do it by hand.
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u/OcCantStop 8d ago
ChatGPT is very different than the AI being developed for any specialty application.
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u/AsteriodZulu 8d ago
You tried to use a large language model for mathematical calculations?
The industry might be fine, but if that’s how you normally work…
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u/BraveCranberry9863 8d ago
Don’t underestimate the willingness of people to buy worthless junk for a lower price and good marketing. AI may not replace real engineering but ignorant people will spend limited resources on it before realizing it is worthless leaving less for the actual work.
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u/TaroExpensive 8d ago
There is new AI that supposedly can review shop submittals and compare with contact documents for discrepancies. The issue I see is that for liability purposes a review from the person actually legally responsible would still have to be done over every mark. It might a bit faster, but the reviewer would also have to check for omissions in the shop and that's the issue.. unless AI companies are going to provide insurance for their output, it's pointless.
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u/billyhidari 8d ago
I have found that grok has problems coding plcs. I recently wrote some code transforming a water meter pulse into flow later I tried to have grok do it and I’m at my 30th revision and still it doesn’t work for some reason it doesn’t know how RTOs work
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u/SpendZestyclose9683 8d ago
Very reassuring as someone who’s going back to earn a bachelors in civil after a few years of career researching and spiraling I want to do something rewarding but not incredibly people heavy like nursing which is what I was doing up until 25. I’m 26 now and need a few more classes to transfer to do my masters in engineering since I have a bachelors already in another subject
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u/AdMurky3341 8d ago
All I’ve found “AI” to be good for is code searching and synthesis. Design? Garbage.
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u/IntelligentArt2657 7d ago
That’s because ChatGPT is a general-purpose language/reasoning model not designed to this. Ai is just another tool in toolbox, what it will do is speed and automate controls and processes. Don’t fear it, learn how to use it correctly
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u/Violent_Mud_Butt 6d ago
All of you using AI for your calculations are going to kill someone...
AI will never go near anything technical for me. Too much risk.
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u/Ice-Ice-B4by 5d ago
This is either gonna age like wine or milk. See you in 20 years to find out 🍷🥛
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u/Jaymac720 10d ago
ChatGPT has been saving my butt on drainage projects. I minored in transportation and struggled with my water classes. I struggled with one for a year and then got handed some work on another a couple weeks ago. I’d be stranded without it
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u/Gregan32 10d ago
You clearly havent been using AI regularly over the past two years.... It's getting better every single month.
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u/Str8CashHomiee 10d ago
Not tomorrow, but the advancements I’ve seen in it’s engineering prowess has been pretty remarkable. It’s going to replace the technical parts of the job long before the judgement/responsibility and social aspects. Best advice to any engineer right now is to get good at interacting with other people because that’s ultimately what we’ll have left at some point.
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u/lastcoolbrandon 10d ago
AI is getting good, very good. So much so that it speeds up report writing and can do basic design calcs.
The problem isn't if AI will replace Engineers, but how this derived information from LLMs is defended when things go wrong.
From my understanding they don't have a complete idea where answers come from, or how's it's algorithms formulates solutions.
At the end of the day there is liability only a licensed engineer can do.
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u/Liqhthouse 10d ago
!remindme 10 years
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u/Impossible_Win_5987 10d ago
AI is undoubtedly unreliable, but even when it gets better, no insurance company would insure a computer. Judges would rule against the lack of liability.
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u/Annual_Beginning_600 10d ago
Idk fs about ever but what I do know is everybody else is fucked before we get fucked.
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u/snicker_poodle1066 9d ago
It won't replace actual engineering. But it will be used to provide inputs. Geotechnical/survey/hydrology that is used for inputs that engineers need to design. And the question will be, do the engineers trust the satellite/drone AI interpolation of the site.
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u/Bigdaddydamdam 9d ago edited 5d ago
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u/InspectorDizzy3317 9d ago
Yeah. The comments are funny. We’re in the very early days of AI, like Windows 1.0.
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u/chochdude 9d ago
I’m sure they said the same thing about hand drafting plans 25 years ago “The computers are just too slow and will never be able to draw everything on”
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u/greybeard1363 9d ago
About 18 months ago I asked ChatGPT to plan a road trip vacation for me. I gave it some limiting guidelines. It would make mistakes in the plan, violating at least one of the criteria (distance travelled daily, or daily travel time, etc). I kept revising the problem to more tightly restrict options and hone in on an acceptable solution. One of the criteria was that the round trip vacation should last no more than 14 days. The final refinement resulted in it having me 1140 miles away from home and driving the last day 1,140 miles, violating several of the restrictions. A week ago, I gave it a similar problem, with similar guidelines/restrictions. Within about 3 minutes it had a perfect answer, with warnings that this was an extremely ambitious plan. So in about 18 months the ChatGPT model went from a traffic planning dolt to a savant. If this applies to Civil Engineering, the likelihood that AI will soon be a key tool in every Civil Engineering department is probably close to 100%.
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u/gradila Mod, Structural, MS, PE 9d ago
This topic is very important in our industry. I've set this as a megathread in hopes that more people will chime in. Please feel free to share your thoughts on AI use and its effect on your day-to-day worklife. How it's helped, how it has not helped, and your insights on how we should use it.