Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by scuff3d 77 days ago
Been saying this for a while now. I work in aerospace, and I can tell you from first hand experience software engineers don't know what designing a spec is.

Aero, mechanical, and electrical engineers spend years designing a system. Design, requirements, reviews, redesign, more reviews, more requirements. Every single corner of the system is well understood before anything gets made. It's a detailed, time consuming, arduous process.

Software engineers think they can duplicate that process with a few skills and a weekend planning session with Claude Code. Because implementation is cheaper we don't have to go as hard as the mechanical and electrical folks, but to properly spec a system is still a massive amount of up front effort.

1 comments

And software isn't as constrained by physics as hardware, which massively expands both the design space as well as how many ways things can go wrong.