Veteran robot engineers finished 4 of 21 RAPID coding tasks with a Claude Code agent and 14 of 21 without it, a University of Passau study finds. They only improved once they learned how to use the agent. For plants putting AI coding tools on robot work, experience alone is not enough; teams need time to learn the tool.
Professional Engineering Consultants in Wichita used Autodesk Platform Services to build an MCP server so engineers can ask questions of a project's drawings, schedules and meeting transcripts before quality control reviews. The firm estimates it saves about an hour per project; it is in beta on around 10% of projects, and it caught an unresolved voltage discrepancy that had no documented fix. A real AI win at an engineering firm is small and specific.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright designated helium a critical material under the Energy Act of 2020, citing its role in semiconductor manufacturing and advanced energy technology. The move opens more federal financing to helium producers. Helium comes out of natural gas processing, so a chip supply worry lands on gas producers and processors.
An unofficial MCP server on the SOLIDWORKS COM API sketches parts, builds assemblies, makes drawings, exports STEP and DXF and runs static stress studies, with failed features rolled back. The author rebuilt it after finding about 115 of 187 tools in an earlier server broken or silently wrong.
For mechanical and design engineers on SOLIDWORKS: note the README warns screenshots and geometry go to the model provider.