https://ramenskiy.com/tags/structural-engineering/ Recent content in Structural-Engineering on Evgeny Ramenskiy Hugo en-us <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">CC BY-NC 4.0</a> Wed, 01 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://ramenskiy.com/posts/posts/the-solver-was-never-the-moat/ Wed, 01 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://ramenskiy.com/posts/posts/the-solver-was-never-the-moat/ <p>Sometime in the last year, the standalone structural solver quietly became a tool call.</p> <p>As of mid-2026: Bentley shipped an open-source MCP server for STAAD. Dlubal built one into RFEM 6. Autodesk shipped one for Revit. Type &ldquo;reduce the steel weight,&rdquo; and an agent iterates the solver and code-checks every pass. The work that used to require a trained specialist at a desktop now runs behind a natural-language prompt.</p> <p>The obvious reading is that the vertical startups are finished. If the incumbent&rsquo;s engine now answers to an agent, why pay a point-solution company that automated one slice of it? I think that reading is wrong, and it is wrong in a way worth being precise about, because the precise version is more useful than the punchy one.</p>