For years I've been telling people that Flux is taking the hard out of hardware. When we started, that mostly meant PCBs. But that was never the destination.
The dream was always much bigger: what if turning an idea into a physical product could become as easy as describing what you want to build?
Today, that future got a lot closer.
We just brought mechanical design and enclosures into the same environment as PCB design, wiring, firmware and more. It's only the first step, but I think it represents a fundamental shift in how hardware will be built.
For the last 50 years, engineering software fragmented into disciplines: EDA, CAD, firmware, industrial design, simulation. That made sense when the human had to operate every tool.
AI changes that assumption.
An AI agent can move seamlessly between electrical, mechanical, firmware and industrial design.
It doesn't need five interfaces.
It needs one: chat!
And once the interface becomes universal, the walls between engineering disciplines start to look increasingly artificial.
Here's why that matters:
Move a connector 5mm.
Today, the ME changes the enclosure. The EE changes the PCB. The harness may change. Someone checks fit, cooling, assembly and manufacturability. Then the ripple continues into assembly instructions, test procedures, compliance docs and user documentation.
One tiny change becomes a coordination problem across the entire product.
Now imagine one agent understands the whole thing.
"Move the USB-C port 5mm to the left."
The design updates. The consequences propagate. The relevant simulations and tests rerun. The documentation updates.
You're no longer designing a collection of files. You're designing the product.
But that's still not the biggest change. The biggest market isn't today's engineers.
It's everyone else!
It's the millions of people who have looked at something in the physical world and thought: "I wish this existed."
Until now, there was an enormous gulf between having that thought and holding the thing in your hands.
Years of training. Multiple engineering disciplines. Specialized tools. An entire vocabulary you had to learn just to begin.
That gulf is starting to collapse too.
Imagine what happens when millions more people can build robots, medical devices, instruments, vehicles, satellites, toys, tools and things none of us have thought of yet.
Not because everyone suddenly became an electrical + mechanical + firmware engineer.
But because everyone suddenly had one working alongside them.
That's what taking the hard out of hardware was always supposed to mean. We didn't know exactly how we'd get there when we started Flux in 2019. We just knew where we wanted to go.
Today, for the first time, you can really see it.
We're ridiculously early. There is so much left to build.
But I think we'll look back at this era as the moment building physical things stopped being reserved for people who dedicated their lives to learning the tools.
The last revolution gave everyone the power to create in bits.
This one gives everyone the power to create in atoms.
That's the future we're building at @buildwithflux
Onward 🚀
