Did CAD make engineers better? certain products are only possible because of CAD but the pen and paper guys weren’t obviously less efficient, and I personally think they were very efficient.

When prototypes are harder to build you focus on answering the biggest questions. I feel like you spend more time iterating on details in CAD, even when the larger idea is invalid.

Agreed it’s far more complex than that.

But people who have only wrote software their entire life wouldn’t know that would they?

It’s like the econ prof’s who theorise about the theory of the firm but have never done it themselves.

Isn't that trivially true? Scenario 1) Spend $10,000 to make one prototype. You get one shot, so you prepare and do as much pre-work as humanly possible, but because you only get one shot, you forgot the ask the question that in Hobbs sight was obvious. Scenario 2) prototypes cost $1,000 so you get multiple shots. So you don't do as much pre-work, throw a half dozen things at the wall. One of them sticks! It really resonates with customers. You iterate a few more times, and when it's finally on the market, you have a successful business.

The difference is all that pre-work. The problem with that is some things are only obvious after you've built one and it doesn't fit just right for some reason. That reason is impossibly harder to just reason about and figure out vs iterating where possible. For software things that's easier. For hardware, we have stories like the palm pilot engineer having a wooden block with them for a week before deciding on the form factor for it. Such pre-work is valuable, but if the cost of prototypes is way down, you can afford to iterate instead of trying to psychically predict everything up front. Of course that doesn't work for eg trips to the Moon, but most busineeses aren't doing that.