Software has eaten the world over the past two decades. Software teams can go from idea to release in days or weeks, make changes on the fly, collaborate asynchronously, and deploy improvements continuously.
It’s not just culture or tooling. It’s how software development is structured:
Meanwhile, hardware development continues to move at a crawl. A new car still takes 4 years to go from concept to market. Even incremental changes to a physical product can take months due to fragmented tools, siloed knowledge, and manual processes.
At Foundation EGI, we believe that engineering—regardless of domain—is fundamentally the act of encoding logic. The inputs may be different (e.g., material specs, tolerances, thermal stresses, etc.) but the core process is the same:
In software, this logic is explicit and machine-readable. In physical product engineering, it’s often implicit—locked inside drawings, tribal knowledge, or legacy workflows. That makes it hard to change, hard to verify, and nearly impossible to scale.
Ironically, much of engineering is already halfway to code. Beneath the CAD models and simulation tools that we use today lies a structured, logical process—inputs, constraints, rules, and outputs. Yet, we’re still dragging geometry in GUIs, replicating workflows by hand, and storing tribal knowledge in scattered files.
Meanwhile, software teams ship faster, collaborate better, and reuse logic effortlessly.
The reason? They treat their work as programmable systems.
Bringing programming principles to engineering unlocks powerful new capabilities.
Imagine creating a product family by adjusting a few variables—rather than redoing every drawing or simulation.
Designs can be validated in real time against physics, performance specs, or cost constraints—just like test suites in software.
Every decision, rule, and assumption is captured and versioned. Teams can track changes and audit logic from concept to release.
Engineers can now share “functions” instead of files—encapsulating validated, reusable logic for use across teams and products.
When engineering is treated like programming, we are able to do to physical engineering what AI is already doing to software generation:
In short, AI becomes a trusted copilot - capable of vastly accelerating the product development cycles.
Not at all! In fact, by making engineering logic programmable, AI can handle much of the complexity—like writing or modifying code—behind the scenes. Engineers can interact with tools like EGI using natural language, just as they would with a colleague. The goal isn’t to turn engineers into coders, but to make logic reusable, testable, and transparent—so they can focus on solving real problems, not rewriting simulations or generating documentation.
If you are an engineer interested in learning how to achieve this, please connect with us.
If you are interested in learning more, please reach out to us at info@foundationegi.com.