Software Engineering Is Becoming Civil Engineering

Sort of.

There is only a handful of ways to make a weld and they all produce essentially the same result.

There is an infinite number of ways to create code of varying quality and clarity.

Welds don't typically need to be maintained the way code does. And all indications are that most LLMs really suck at it. So what code generating LLMs are really doing is creating technical debt to be revealed later.

If civil engineering was really like software development, the first woodpecker that came along could potentially destroy a good chunk of civilization.