While software engineering certainly deals with different constraints, I don’t think this is a fair comparison. When stakes are low (as they are for most software engineering), different precautions are appropriate. The aerospace or financial software engineering worlds might be more comparable here, and the engineering for those systems looks quite different as a result.
See also: https://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2026/programming_is_engineerin...
From the linked article:
> And I would say that the success of AI coding agents has proved once and for all that we had successfully built an engineering discipline so strong that we are also the first discipline that has been able to successfully run AI at large scale within our discipline.
Yet we have no real clue how AI works or how to debug it, it's a brute force solution to everyday problems. Daily there are new examples of AI "escaping" its enforced cage. Why? Why doesn't AI "just work"? Because we don't truly understand AI.
I think AI is exactly the opposite to "true" engineering where one understands the system and can reproduce it. After all, retraining the AI will probably give you a completely different AI even if the training data was the same.
The trend is that they don’t because there’s a continuous maintenance happening on all of those. There’s an army of people doing checks and repairs all the time. Even then, it happens, like in Genoa.
In Germany, twice a year inspection is mandatory for infrastructure [1] but this is only a visual inspection. Once every 6 years you got a large inspection [2] that includes a full go over everything including functionality checks plus a review of documentation (if it is still up to code) and of accident documentation, as well as a "knock test" on every m² of surface [3]. Fire safety systems are checked every quarter [4].
And out of these reports then you get action items. Depending on the severity of findings, it can be anything from "someone needs to do this until the next major inspection" to "holy cow stop ALL traffic NOW".
[1] https://www.stbapa.bayern.de/service/medien/meldungen/2023/2...
[2] https://www.fba.bund.de/DE/Meldungen/20230201_Tunneluntersuc...
[3] https://www.merkur.de/lokales/muenchen/baustellen-besuch-sta...
[4] https://www.autobahn.de/aktuelles/aktuell/tunnelwartung-im-b...
We take advantage of the situation. If we invented some way of e.g. "growing" structures that turned out to be much cheaper we'd probably adapt our attitude to changing them.
Imagining building a bridge and then in the middle someone comes along and says it should also be a tunnel. I think therein lies a main difference to engineering and software engineering: planning and sticking to a plan.
Another thing are incentives: real engineering has real incentives to do it right, else you will get sued - by the families of those that died. Software engineering does not have this incentive to get it right.