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> Using AI in software hackathons are magnitudes cheaper than AI doing manual labor in hardware hackathons.

Sure: Going all-in on the bot with the hypothetical sorter and pick-and-place delta robot and the soldering machine? That's never going to be cheap.

But one doesn't have to go all-in. The bot (potentially along with an army of subagents) can ingest a goal and a list of parts on-hand and their specifications. Like an army of bots that is instructed to write code, it can sit there and iterate on designs like a thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters until it finds one that actually works.

The humans (remember the humans?) can sit back and have a beer while this happens, and then start the physical process of hacking the thing together once the bot gives them direction.

Look at this list of suggested concepts:

  -  Building a ridiculous Apple II application
  -  Turning a fax machine into a social media network
  -  Turning a Game Boy Advance into a Bloomberg terminal
  -  Making an LLM-driven cash register that can feel love and pain
  -  An AI voice-activated microwave

If a person can't imagine ways to use the bot for these things, then are they really trying?