AI learned to write. Then it learned to code. Now it is beginning to design.
For an experienced mechanical engineer, that raises a much more practical question: Can AI multiply the value of decades of engineering experience?
In this episode of The Common Room, we examine the cutting edge of AI-assisted mechanical CAD and machine design in 2026—from the perspective of a veteran automation engineer who has spent four decades designing real machines and is now working as an independent consultant.
We look at Onshape and its remarkable new AI/MCP connection to parametric CAD; SOLIDWORKS and 3DEXPERIENCE; Autodesk Inventor; PTC Creo; and Siemens NX and Solid Edge. We also look beyond the familiar CAD companies to China’s emerging AI-CAD efforts and Japan’s CADDi, where AI is being applied to the accumulated knowledge surrounding manufacturing and design.
Then we go further.
Jeff Bezos-backed Prometheus is pursuing the idea of an “artificial general engineer” for the physical world. Meanwhile, local AI tools such as LM Studio and Ollama raise another possibility: a private engineering workstation where confidential designs, calculations, standards, component information and decades of accumulated engineering knowledge could work together with AI.
Consider a typical automation project. An engineer must turn requirements into cycle-time calculations, machine architecture, mechanisms, conveyors, actuators, frames, guarding, CAD models, cost estimates and eventually a customer proposal.
A senior machine designer may already know what should be built.
The bottleneck is often turning that knowledge into all the engineering work required to build it.
What happens when AI begins helping with that translation?
Could one experienced independent engineer eventually produce the conceptual output that once required a small engineering team?
And if AI can increasingly draw, calculate, configure, simulate and document the machine, does forty years of engineering experience become less valuable—or more valuable than ever?
The Artificial Engineer is a practical, skeptical look at where mechanical CAD and engineering AI stand today—and where they may be taking the engineering profession next.
The Common Room is a Chesterton Radio original from the little station on Commercial Street in Atchison, Kansas.
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