Most hardware engineering is software engineering in disguise

Blake Scholl, who founded Boom Supersonic as a software engineer with little hands-on hardware experience, argues that much hardware design is software work in an informal, underdeveloped form. Engineers routinely calculate how inputs such as structural or thermal loads translate into component designs, but often do so through one-off spreadsheets rather than robust, reusable systems. He compares this practice to writing rudimentary code without software engineering’s architecture, testing, interfaces, or version control. His proposed shift is to build and maintain the algorithms that generate hardware, rather than designing each component as a fixed answer to current assumptions. That makes designs easier to revise when requirements change.

At Boom, Scholl says this approach has made small teams substantially more productive. A turbomachinery tool lets one engineer perform in real time work that formerly took 100 engineers six months, while another system automatically generates 65 percent of an aircraft’s structure. He sees AI as making it practical for more people to code, with software engineers establishing system architecture and hardware specialists supplying physics and engineering expertise. The longer-term aim is a unified physics model covering an entire aircraft and its powertrain. Scholl points to a supersonic aircraft developed by 50 people and a full-scale turbine by 150 as evidence that disciplined software methods can accelerate hardware development and reduce the team sizes needed to build and certify complex machines.