America's ability to build has been on a slow and scary decline... but people like cofounders CEO Fil Aronshtein and CTO Peter Weiss have had enough.

Episode 25 of S³ features Dirac who is reimagining what the future of the blueprint should be like in 2024.

The History and Present of American Manufacturing

Shortly after filming Fil sent me this video explaining “this is our vibe,” when thinking and working on Dirac: American exceptionalism.

In America’s golden age of manufacturing, we have huge ambitions for the future, we’ll get to that later though. In addition to that, the blueprint for design was done in close conjunction and in a tighter feedback loop with the people who built the thing.

Today, that’s no longer the case.

Software products, specifically the adoption of CAD software, have severed the engineer from the reality of constructing the physical thing in the real world. Now to be clear I’m not saying CAD or any modern software engineering advancements are bad, they’re certainly not!

But, as Fil explains in the episode, software engineers have spent a lot of resources on building great design tools for engineers. Meanwhile, production folks have been left behind in innovation.

Have you ever gone into a modern or active factory? If you have, what was the software experience like on the floor? In short, it sucks. The machines are run off of the earliest versions of Windows and Linux, the software is ancient in its capabilities.

Fil and Peter want to fix that, they have Asimov-level ambitions, which you can hear about in the episode.

What is Build OS?

Fil and Peter have started by creating “Build OS” which does the following:

• Drop in a CAD part, BuildOS automatically breaks it down and suggests build instructions for ~90% of the part

• The remaining 10% is where “tribal knowledge” of production engineers and manufacturing engineers can come in and make adjustments

• This can be viewed as an interactive web instance or a PDF, like typical build instructions, on the factory floor

This is one of those “obvious once you hear it” or “uh, doesn’t this already exist?” kind of ideas.

Building the Future

In preparation for the episode, Fil suggested I read Freedom’s Forge by Arthur L. Herman, which I did. This book paints the picture of a few businessmen, factorymen — builders — who answered the call before it even was a call, to get the US and therein the world to a manufacturing capability that won us World War II.

Essentially, it’s about how we went from low manufacturing capability to a level that the world thought impossible.

Fil also suggested Where’s My Flying Car by J. Storr's Hall which if Freedom’s Forge is about getting to the peak of American Industrialism, is about the decline back to where we are today.

One thing I love about Fil and Peter is their obsession with getting back to the innovation of the 50s and 60s. They have huge ambitions and most excitingly, a real roadmap to achieve their vision by fixing real manufacturing problems that exist today.

Thank you to Fil and Peter for taking the time to do this, and thank you, especially to Fil for convincing me to come to New York to film with you and other exciting companies. Oh, and for the chicken sandwich, that was really good stuff and I’m happy we got the one with all of the fun stuff like butter, honey, pickles — the works.

As always, thank you for reading, watching, and supporting. Keep on building the future.

— Jason