Angel Espinoza borrows Jeffrey Katzenberg’s “it’s not the how, it’s the why” line from Hollywood and applies it to civil engineering work with coding agents—agents change the how, not the purpose.
Last week, Jeffrey Katzenberg published an essay on AI and Hollywood. He was writing about animators and storytellers, not engineers. But one line in it, which he credits to George Lucas, has stayed with me all week: "It's not the how, it's the why."
What Walt never talked about
Katzenberg tells a story from his Disney years. When the animation studio was at a turning point, they went back to Walt's own recordings, notes, and storyboards. What they heard was character, emotion, and whether the audience believed. What they did not hear was a word about pencils or paint.
The tools changed after that, more than once. Hand-painted cels gave way to computers, and then to films made on computers from start to finish. The point stayed exactly where Walt left it.
We have had our own hows
Our industry has lived the same story. Ink on vellum. AutoCAD. Land Desktop. Civil 3D. Each one showed up with the same mix of fear and promise, and I have written about the last time we went through it.
Now the new how is a coding agent. Nearly everything on this site was built with one. I talk about it a lot, because it is new and people ask.
But it is the how.
So why do I AI?
Not for the agent. Not for the code, either. The code is a means.
The why has not changed since I was writing about Civil 3D releases. We are an industry that lays down the roads, pipes, and crossings everyone else's day runs on. I want us to get better at that. Fewer afternoons lost to the fortieth copy of the same task. More hours spent on the judgment only an engineer can supply, the part nobody else puts their stamp on.
Every tool I have built started with one question: what does this make better, and for whom? A parking lot layout. Signal poles around an intersection. A folder of scans nobody could find. None of them started with "what can an agent do?"
The question worth asking
So when a new tool shows up, AI included, I try not to start with how it works. I start with why we would want it. If we cannot answer that, the how does not matter much.