[syntaxing]

Was a Mechanical Design Engineer for about a decade. Personally, the CAD part was the easy and fun part (Used Solidworks, Creo, Inventor, Catia v5 extensively. Professionally trained in all four as well). The “tedious” part was SAP (part number and material management), drafting, ECN/R/O, BOM handling, etc. I would be more excited for “AI” for PLM like Windchill, TeamCenter, or Cadedge (or whatever SAP PLM packages you used)

[ultrasounder]

Echo this. As an EE fun part is circuit design and the tedious part is SAP and agile. This is where AI needs to be. Parts creation from data sheets, and automatic sync between SAP and Altium/cadence.

[DanTheManPR]

I've been a Mechanical Engineer for a similar length of time, using Solidworks and Creo, and I concur. I've released many thousands of parts over the course of my career, and I don't think of the modeling itself as a major time sink (provided you have some decent training, and are using a thoughtful approach and not fighting the software). If the AI copilot could actually do all the modeling based on prompts, that would be pretty interesting, especially if it could create a feature try that I could tweak.

Automatic drafting is something that I think might be a good target for doing some AI research on. Your prompt exists in the form of the solid model, and it's feature tree and parameters. The output is the lay out views and annotations. It's okay if the output isn't perfect, as I would expect to be reviewing it and doing some tweaks.

Helping with all of the ERP processes involved with releasing and maintaining engineering documentation would be a HUGE time saver. If I could ask a copilot program to start a change request, and give it some basic descriptions of what I'm changing, it would be massively helpful if it could start pulling relevant files, and auto-filling the right requests/forms/whatever to do that process.

[bradfox2]

Hey! We're building this. It's a workflow driven automated documentation system for engineers based on your document templates. We started in energy and have expanded into engineering services. Would love your feedback.

fast-draft.ai

Please, please send me an email or dm if you are interested.

[kevinsane]

We are on the same page. We absolutely want to help out with most of those tasks as well. We especially want to help with part selection and BOM creation. However, material/inventory management I will admit, wasn't on our roadmap. Although absolutely important, we felt that there were many solutions already existing in that space. If I am wrong, I would love to chat more! Please ping us on the contact us page, and I'll try to get back to you!

[blackguardx]

What do you do now? Did you switch to software?

[syntaxing]

Yup, had the opportunity to switch to full time software a couple years back so I jumped at the opportunity.

[digdugdirk]

I'm looking to do the same. What did you jump to, and how did you make the switch?

[syntaxing]

I’ve been debating writing a book about this to enable hardware to jump to software. I work on a bunch of infrastructure related code (make sure everything is running correctly). As for the switch, it takes a bit of luck and hard work. Luck wise, my employer has an opening and I happen to fit the need. Hard work wise, you still need to prove your worth. I was coding about 50/50 in my previous role so it was easy to sell my case. I went on some interviews lately and it’s important to know the game. Being able to Leetcode and system design is for the better or worse the de facto standard if you want to land a SWE role.