15 years doing DES work - started using AI coding tools to build simulation models and it's changed my workflow more than I expected

I've been doing discrete-event simulation for about 15 years - queueing models, resource optimisation, production line analysis, healthcare patient flow. Chartered Engineer, if that matters.

Over the past several months I've been using Claude Code pretty heavily for building simulation models and engineering tools. Not as a replacement for understanding what you're modelling - more like removing the coding bottleneck so the modelling work happens faster.

Concrete example: a hospital queueing model that I'd normally spec out and then spend a few days coding up in Python/SimPy. Described the model structure, arrival distributions, resource constraints, and routing logic to Claude Code in plain English. Had a working simulation running in under an hour. Still needed to validate it properly - the AI doesn't understand whether your warm-up period is reasonable or whether your service time distribution matches reality. That part is still the modeller's job. But the translation from "I know what this model needs to look like" to "I have running code" went from days to roughly an hour.

Where it falls down: anything that requires genuine understanding of the problem domain. It'll build what you describe, but it won't question your assumptions. Feed it a bad model specification and you get a perfectly coded bad model. The OR expertise is still the hard part. Arguably it matters more now, because the coding barrier isn't filtering out people who haven't thought carefully about what they're modelling.

I wrote a free guide covering everything I've learned about using Claude Code for this kind of work - aimed at engineers and analysts who know what they want to build but aren't doing full-time software development. I'll put the link in the comments for anyone who wants it.

Has anyone else in OR been experimenting with AI coding tools for simulation or optimisation work? There's a lot of noise about this in the tech world but I haven't seen much discussion from the simulation community specifically.