Guy builds AI driven hardware hacker arm from duct tape, old cam and CNC machine

Nowadays the former seems to be a requirement for the latter, so I'm inclined to agree with you

It’s hard to imagine anyone wanting this to be real more than I do, but this is nowhere close to being ready to do actual work. Photographing real PCBs is hard, there is no fiducial maths, no actual probing is being done. It's just photos of a photo being piped into an agent. If it actually did what it claims, no reasonable person would exclude it from the demo video.

https://gainsec.com/2026/04/16/autoprober/

Guy builds car from stick of gum, paperclip, and an old vehicle

I figured this was some kind of home-grown prosthetic arm whose wearer could, using AI, draw any artwork online, speak ASL, perform minor surgery on themselves and so much more so long as their supply of tokens lasted.

Perhaps a smidge disappointed when I had a look and discovered it wasn't that :)

I think the novel idea here is you jam some hardware together (whatever you like) that can do "physical real world" things with a well understood interface and then spin up Claude with access to it.

The way I'm thinking about it is, it's a _workflow_ innovation?

So you ask for data sheets for all the visible chips and get PDFs in an output directory with minimal user interaction except to flip the board, ask for a basic idea of connectivity, get a stitched high res surface image etc.... which of course are all currently possible, but you can do them potentially with very low effort. There doesn't have to be a _software stack_ ahead of time. You ask Claude to do the thing, it will figure out how to do it, write some code, pull in some OSS and make the thing happen. You can take this project's software or leave it.

You might say "tell me where you think the JTAG headers are" and it will come up with a workflow to do its best at that task (most likely with variable results...), but nonetheless this is not a thing you can ask of any commercial product I am aware of today. With probes, stuff can get interesting.

Of course experienced hardware & reverse engineers already can do all this stuff and have a plethora of workflows for it but I still think it's an interesting POC of a generalisable approach. You can take or leave this particular software stack. Also, the hardware barely matters, you can duct tape whatever to whatever.