TIL that CAD came out of the Cold War, via @bbalkus’s piece in @arenamag, “The Drawing Machine: How the United States Invented Industrial Software.” The Soviets tested an atomic bomb in 1949, the Pentagon had no way to track their bombers in real time, and MIT’s answer (Lincoln Lab, SAGE, the TX-2 computer) eventually produced Sketchpad, the ancestor of every CAD program. War efforts have historically produced the tools the rest of society uses a generation later, the current defense and industrial buildout will be no different. In 1972, Ben Rich, who would go on to run Lockheed’s Skunk Works (its advanced R&D group), wrote a memo calling computers a scourge of the industry because he thought they made engineers lazy and blunted expertise. A few years later one of his own engineers wrote a program called Echo 1 to predict radar cross-section, and Skunk Works used it to design the prototype for the F-117 stealth fighter. Similar claims of builder laziness have followed agentic engineering tools as they’ve spread over the past few years. But the expertise moves with the tools rather than disappearing. People become experts at a task, encode that expertise in software, then move on to becoming experts at the next one, and the loop repeats.