askchapo

I was at a manufacturing technology conference recently and one of the fucking CAM system vendors is trying to shoehorn a LLM chatbot into their flagship product. They've invested a substantial amount of marketing resources into this if they are out hyping it at trade shows (and even more money pissed away on "consulting" and development, surely). No interactive demo though. Just a handful of slides showing how you can prompt an LLM and it spits out a Python script using their APIs.

It could be worse. They could just have an LLM trying to write G-Code directly with no constraints at all, but either way this is a thing that absolutely nobody in the industry is asking for. This is not how industrial design works. This is not how mechanical engineering works. This is not how contract manufacturing works. This is not how product lifecycles are managed. This is not how designs are specified and communicated between firms. Nobody is trying to fucking vibe code their multi-million dollar precision industrial robots. These things can take over a year to procure, install, and validate. One mistake is all it takes to start a fire or launch a projectile through the operator (or just fuck up months worth of bespoke fixtures and tooling on top of a $80,000 repair bill from the machine vendor). Just unknowable amounts of money being set on fire here for a manufacturing product which will never be applied to the actual production of commodities. Which will never make money either for the end user or even the vendor.

It is like they are trying to create a product with the sort of novelty a hobbyist with a 3D printer (and no money) might appreciate, but are targeting companies with millions of dollars of fixed capital with complex contractual obligations and stringent requirements for process and document control, where the liabilities for quality control and potential recalls are a matter of life and death for the firm.