Topics worth your time this issue: Claude standardizes factory testing, the slow collapse of optical disc drives, part 3 of graduating from a garage machine shop, a16z's new Machine Age Fund, and more around the ecosystem.
Interesting Presentation: The Factory is the Product
An under-appreciated reality of manufacturing is that you’re almost always building two products: the thing itself, and the system that determines whether you built it correctly. Without that second system, manufacturing becomes open-loop. A factory can produce units, but with no real feedback mechanism to tell whether what’s coming off the line is built as intended.
Anthropic’s recent announcement of the Model Hardware Standard (MHS) is framed around open-ended scientific research, but one of its applications may mark the start of a standardized version of that second system - factory test infrastructure.
“It typically takes a lab or manufacturing facility weeks, if not months, to set up and integrate their hardware. Most devices don’t communicate with each other, instead requiring specialists to build bespoke integrations. [...] MHS addresses these challenges by introducing a standardized driver: software that translates between a computer’s operating system and a hardware device. The MHS driver uses a simple set of primitives—commands like ‘read’ or ‘write’—that any hardware device can understand and act on. And it makes each device discoverable in a standard format…without needing a bespoke ‘translator’ program in between.”
None of this is particularly exotic (it’s a familiar experience to anyone who has built a test station: stacks of instruments, drivers, and scripts), but what’s changed rapidly in the last year is how much of the stack a team can own internally. Today’s engineer doesn’t need to know every vendor SDK, write each driver by hand, or work through the firmware interface to coordinate instruments. MHS simply goes one step further, using Claude Code to standardize the translation layer.
A useful companion piece is Martin Ling’s presentation on building factory test systems with open hardware. Nominally it’s about testing circuit boards, but he describes the same ethos in practice; moving the control layer into Python through GreatFET, without having to define another protocol between the test software and the hardware.
More From Around The Web
- Related reading on the scale of testing infrastructure: Skydio runs more than 300 automated tests across its products; Formlabs has a 60-point calibration and QC process for every printer.
- A sad consequence of gaming’s shift to digital is the slow collapse of the optical disc drive supply chain. Factories and assembly lines previously oriented around making optical disc drives are moving towards other, more lucrative and more scalable industries, such as camera lenses and the like.
- Mapping America’s grid health.
- A magic eight ball, or Is It Itar?
- Animation frames using layer lines to create a 3D-printed backflip.
Watch the video in the original issue.
Interesting Video: Graduating from a Garage Machine Shop
Our third check-in with Ascended Technologies, a one-person CNC shop that started with $8,000 in equipment and has now outgrown the original space. Follow his progression through our previous issues on 1/11/25 and 1/16/26.
Manufacturing & Startup News
- Shaper is moving its digital woodworking tools into Festool’s portfolio in 2027, with the standalone Shaper brand winding down later this year.
- Fitbit co-founders James Park and Eric Friedman are developing Luffu Link, a wearable aimed at family care.
- Ursa Major plans to go public via a $2.3B SPAC, raising $350M to expand production of rocket engines and solid rocket motors.
- Radiant won a contract worth up to $750M to develop and deploy 15 transportable 1 MW nuclear microreactors for U.S. Army installations by 2030.
- a16z raised $1.1B for its Machine Age Fund.