Building custom engineering tools with AI coding tools instead of waiting for IT or paying for another software licence

Chartered Engineer here, 15 years in simulation and modelling. Not chemical engineering specifically - my background is discrete-event simulation across manufacturing, transport, defence, energy dsystems and mining. But the pain of expensive commercial software and six-month IT backlogs is universal enough that I think what I've been doing might be relevant here.

I've been using Claude Code (Anthropic's AI coding tool) to build custom engineering tools and prototypes. Not replacing Aspen or HYSYS or anything at that level (yet) - more like the custom bits that every process team needs and nobody has time to build. Calculation checkers, data pipeline tools, internal dashboards, automation for repetitive analysis workflows and rapid simulation prorotypes. The stuff that currently lives in a spreadsheet because nobody could justify the time or the budget to build it properly.

The approach: you describe what you want the tool to do in plain English, Claude Code writes the code and does the computer stuff. You review it, tell it what's wrong, iterate. What I've found is that your engineering knowledge is what makes the whole thing work. The AI handles the programming. You handle knowing whether the output is physically reasonable, whether the assumptions make sense, whether the units are right, whether the edge cases are covered. Without that domain expertise you'd just be generating professional-looking tools that are quietly wrong.

I ended up writing a free guide about the whole process - how to set it up, how to describe what you want effectively, how to review and iterate on what it produces, and how to actually deploy things for your team to use. It's aimed at engineers who know their domain but aren't software developers by trade.

Here's the link to grab a copy: schoolofsimulation.com/claude-code-book

Full book, 23 chapters - covers setup through to deployment. I ask for an email to deliver it - you can unsubscribe the moment it arrives, genuinely just looking for feedback before the wider launch.

Anyone here been experimenting with AI coding tools for chemical engineering work? Curious how it maps to process engineering workflows - there's obviously a lot of domain-specific tooling that would need proper validation but for internal utilities and prototyping it's been genuinely useful in my experience.