Thesis
Software got a 1000x.Hardware got a meeting.
AI has moved into the physical layer. The workflows that prove physical things work have not moved at all.
Software
An engineer describes intent; the machine writes, runs, and fixes the code.
The loop closed. Output per engineer went up by orders of magnitude, and the tooling kept pace every quarter.
Hardware
A test engineer still writes the station scripts by hand, one revision at a time.
The loop never closed. The fixture, the limits, the logs, and the triage all still run through a person.
One of these two columns is going to get rewritten. We are betting it is the second one, and that it happens at test.
Intelligence reached the physical layer
Robotics, autonomy, and defense hardware are shipping on timelines that used to belong to software. The models are good enough; the atoms are the constraint now.
But the factory floor didn't get the upgrade
Manufacturing test is where every physical product is proven, and it is still manual, tribal, and rebuilt from scratch on every revision. It is the narrowest point in the whole pipeline.
So the bottleneck moved to test
You can design a robot faster than you can prove one works. Bring-up, yield, and triage now set the schedule — not design, not firmware, not supply.
That is the layer we build
Agents that read the design, derive the limits, run the station, hold the baseline, and tell you whether it was the board, the fixture, or the test.
The next decade runson machines.
Every one of them has to be tested before it ships, and again every time it changes. We are building the layer that makes that keep up.