Professional and Career Topics

Engineering is the art of the possible. Solutions do not necessarily need to be elegant or sophisticated. What is an example of when lazy engineering paid dividends for you? 

P.S. Lazy engineering is not bad engineering.

I've had colleagues who are experienced programmers tell me they've started using LLMs such as ChatGPT to assist with writing code. Generally they provide the prompts for the packages they want to use, and other details but leave it up to the program to get the exact syntax correct. Then they make further edits to the code that was written to integrate it into their own workflows with the actual data that they didn't share with the LLM. 

One of my early examples goes back to the early 1980s.  One of our pieces of environmental criteria was the product of several random variables. My predecessor was smarter than I was and could do it mathematically. Fortunately, I had recently been exposed to Monte Carlo simulation. In no time, I wrote the code and typed the punch cards to simulate the process and let the computer do the hard work. Besides being a work-around, the method was more transparent to the end user.