In this episode of Terminal Value, I'm joined by Viral Shah, co-founder and CEO of JuliaHub, the company behind Dyad — a physics compiler paired with AI agents for engineering and simulation — to discuss why physical product engineering has been so hard to automate, what an AI agent actually needs to model the real world, and whether hardware development can start to look much more like software.
We cover the "engineering V" and why every step runs in its own siloed tool, why the real TAM is the trillions spent designing products rather than the billions spent on simulation software, how Dyad works as a compiler that fuses disparate physics into one simulation, why calibration — not modeling — is the hard part, how Instron cut crash-test-rig calibration from over a day to under a minute, why trusted reusable model libraries make hardware feel like software (text, Git, CI/CD, agents), how agent pricing shifts from per-seat licenses to token consumption, why the harness can matter more than the frontier model, why engineering shows high expected but low observed AI impact today, and why Viral believes hardware engineering is going to become like writing software.
0:00 Hook: Why hardware engineering could become like software
0:35 Intro to Viral Shah, JuliaHub, and Dyad
1:25 How engineers move from product requirements to validated designs
4:41 Why engineering software is fragmented across specialized tools
12:16 Where Dyad fits and why JuliaHub built a physics compiler
19:17 How real-world data calibrates simulation models
23:21 Building trusted models that can be reused like software libraries
26:17 Where Dyad is being used across aerospace, semiconductors, and infrastructure
29:10 How agentic engineering changes seat-based software pricing
31:37 Why the agent harness can matter more than the frontier model
35:44 Why AI adoption in engineering still lags software
38:13 Why Viral Shah believes hardware development will become more like software
41:04 Closing takeaways on Dyad and the shift toward computational engineering
Disclaimer: For information and education only; not investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell securities. Views are the speakers’ own.