BOB ON THE FLOOR

Factories run critical equipment on hardware and protocols that predate modern software entirely — Modbus, proprietary serial links, PLCs programmed in ladder logic decades ago. Nobody dares touch them: No one can talk to the machine. The protocol is old, undocumented, or vendor-locked. There's no API, just a serial cable and tribal knowledge. Nobody notices trouble until it's expensive. Vibration drift, thermal creep, and bearing wear build up silently until a machine fails or a technician happens to be standing nearby. Fixes live in someone's head or a filing cabinet. The right repair procedure is buried in a decade-old PDF manual or a closed ticket, not searchable, not indexed. Ladder logic is a barrier, not a skill most people have. Even when the fix is known, writing and verifying the actual PLC code takes a specialist. Existing "AI for manufacturing" hackathon projects (see naming-and-landscape-check.md section below) mostly attack compliance and attestation — signing commands, auditing who approved what. That's a different problem. We're not auditing the machine. We're trying to understand, notice, remember, and fix it — the way an experienced technician would.