Is your question any different than how LLMs are impacting software engineers? A software engineer’s job isn’t just banging out lines of code either and you can’t effectively vibe code software without knowing how to describe what you want to build and having SWE domain language, and yet LLMs are having a massive impact on the industry and career.

I see no special barrier for mechanical engineering either. CAD can be represented in text. Statics and dynamics are already calculated in software, simulations are already ran in software. Specs for things are already formalized in both format and notation. All the pieces are there if you squint at it a little, they’re just not quite as easy as software tooling was, but it’s certainly closer than a surgeon’s or plumbers job.