Hardware

Software Still Needs Hands

The intelligence is no longer the bottleneck. The hands are.

That’s the uncomfortable shape of the next few years, and it inverts a decade of intuition. We spent the 2010s assuming the scarce thing was smarts — the model, the algorithm, the IQ in the room. Now you can rent a near-frontier model by the token and point a thousand of them at a problem overnight. So the constraint moves. If a system can think but can’t make — etch a wafer, pipette a reagent, bond a die — then making is where the world slows down. As one builder put it on a recent conversation, “the software still needs hands,” and “if it can’t make things, then those are real, real boundaries.” This piece was sparked by The AI Industrial Revolution with Naval Ravikant; the line stuck because it’s a builder’s claim, not a philosopher’s, and it’s testable against what’s actually shipping in 2026.

Vibe Coding a Turbine Blade

The claim that snaps everything into focus is small and absurd: “it allows two engineers to design an entire jet engine.” The mechanism behind it is even more provocative — “the hardware engineers can vibe code their pieces.” If that holds, then hardware engineering quietly becomes a branch of software engineering, and the headcount math that has governed aerospace for fifty years stops applying.