Agents are now doing real hardware and low-level work
The 'Using AI to reverse engineer hardware' thread was full of people already doing it. One pointed Claude at a work laptop's MIPI driver. Another built custom firmware for an old Onn x5 MP3 player. A third asked why anyone is targeting ancient hardware instead of useful closed-source hardware and software from Apple or Nvidia. In the KiCad 10 AI PCB design thread, a commenter said JLC part search is huge, and another said their team built an in-house CLI tool for agents with dozens of KiCad file utilities and got pretty good results.
A 60-year-old posted that Claude Code re-ignited his passion, and replies came from a 51-year-old electrical engineer who now has the guts to go solo-founder and from a manager who builds many small side projects. One person with bipolar disorder said it works like an accessibility tool for the frustrating parts of coding.
The counterpoint: another commenter spent two days coding with Claude and found it unfulfilling, like getting an A on a test without studying.
So what?
Hardware and embedded work, long protected by tedium and niche knowledge, is opening up to small teams with agents. Look for hardware-adjacent niches where documentation is poor and the barrier was patience, and expect more solo founders to arrive from engineering and management backgrounds.