For decades, engineering colleges across India, the IITs included, have made first-years take Engineering Drawing. Even the computer science students. Most of them will never draw an isometric projection at work, and most of them complain about it.
They are missing the point of the course.
A drawing has to say exactly what to make
Engineering Drawing exists because the person who designs a thing and the person who builds it are rarely the same person. A drawing has to specify every dimension and every hidden edge, from every side. Someone else must be able to build it without asking you a single question.
One ambiguous line and the part comes back wrong.
That used to be a mechanical engineer’s problem. It’s about to be yours.
AI is now the one doing the building
When you hand a system to an AI assistant, it builds exactly what you described, including the parts you described badly. The skill that decides whether the result works is the same one Engineering Drawing was teaching all along: specifying a system precisely enough that someone else can build it.
The Drawing Board
At Trevor, every system starts on a whiteboard. Before you write the code, and before you open an AI assistant, you defend your design to a reviewer:
- The views: data, failure, load and cost.
- The interfaces: what each part promises the others.
- Where it will break: and what happens when it does.
First-years do it for a shell. By graduation, specifying exactly what to build is the most natural thing you do.
You can only draw what you understand.
We’re not disrupting engineering education. We’re returning to it. See how the four years are structured.
