It was so wonderful to have @steipete at Microsoft today to talk about the Future of Agentic Engineering and to spend time with the Scout Team and also my boss @jeffteper to chat about @openclaw - the future is bright!

mars doesn't need a robot that folds laundry 1X shipped hands for the kitchen this week and everyone clapped. meanwhile the actual frontier has zero robots designed for it by anyone outside three government labs so we're going to fix that. MARS ROBOT MARATHON. details below [ the setup ] crewed Mars flights are closer than most people think. but humans land last. first go the scouts, the drillers, the cave divers, and that fleet does not exist yet > Perseverance cost $2.7B and took thousands of engineers a decade > Ingenuity was supposed to fly 5 times. it flew 72. the assumptions are always wrong in the builder's favor > AI already designed a working rocket engine that got printed and test-fired > designing a Mars scout is now a problem one person with an agent team attacks from a bedroom the tools got democratized. the ideas didn't catch up yet. that's the opening [ the spec, non-negotiable ] > walks on terrain that eats wheels for breakfast > climbs crater walls and 40 degree slopes > drills, because everything interesting on Mars is underground > dodges obstacles alone. instructions from Earth take up to 20 minutes one way, a rock doesn't wait > descends into lava tube caves and maps them [ why caves are the whole game ] > Mars gravity is a third of Earth's, so its lava tubes grow monstrous. wide enough to hide a city block > they block most of the surface radiation > temperature inside stays stable while the surface swings 100 degrees a day > if life still exists on Mars, it's not sunbathing on the surface. it's down there in the dark whoever maps the caves first owns the map everyone else lands by [ the marathon ] design the scout that goes first. experiment with shapes: spider on a tether, snake that swallows tunnels, a swarm with one nuclear mother and ten expendable kids. mars doesn't care about earth aesthetics > drop your design in the replies: sketch, render, napkin drawing, AI blueprint, anything > best 3 get a full breakdown in a dedicated post > the winner gets turned into a complete engineering blueprint, my agent team does the drafting i'm dropping my own MK-I first your move, engineers

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Six grown men in Michigan spent three weeks building a toy car out of a block of wood. None of them got to keep it. It belonged to an eight-year-old boy whose father had died in March. My coworker Kohei lived on that street for two years. His son was in the same Cub Scout pack as the boy. That's how I know any of this. The boy's name is Tucker. Every winter, in church basements all over America, little kids race tiny wooden cars down a long ramp. It's called the Pinewood Derby. Every kid gets the same block of pine, four nails, four plastic wheels. And every kid builds it with his dad. That's the whole point. Every American man I've ever asked remembers his first one. Tucker's dad, Jesse, drove a tow truck. He died of a heart attack in March. He was 39. In the garage, Tucker's mom found the kit. Jesse had bought it in February. On the box, in marker: TUCKER + DAD. Inside, on a sheet of graph paper, a drawing. A little car shaped exactly like Jesse's tow truck. Red. With a hook on the back. She didn't know how to build it. She didn't ask anybody. She didn't have to. Mr. Petrakis, 74, a retired machinist three doors down, showed up with the block already cut to the shape of the drawing. "Had the bandsaw out anyway," he said. He had not used that bandsaw since 2011. Lou from the body shop painted it. The exact red of Jesse's truck, which was still sitting in the driveway. He matched it from the truck itself. He wouldn't take money for the paint. He said it was leftover. It was a custom mix. Gordy, the Little League coach, spent four nights polishing the axles with toothpaste, because that's what his dad did with him in 1971. Pastor Neil drilled the holes for the weights. Not lead. Pennies. From the coffee can on Jesse's dresser. He counted them in one at a time until the car weighed exactly five ounces. Two more men, whose names Kohei never learned, made the little tow hook out of a paper clip. It took them two evenings and one argument. On the first night, Tucker told them his dad's one rule: "Dad says I do the sanding. Always." So six grown men stood in a cold garage, handed an eight-year-old a piece of sandpaper, and waited. Kohei held the flashlight. He says nobody talked much. One night Lou went out to his truck for a while and came back with red eyes and said it was the paint fumes. There was one more thing. Before he died, Jesse had traced the outline of the car on the block in pencil. When Tucker sanded, he sanded around it. He would not touch that line. So it stayed, a faint gray line all the way down the side of the car. Gordy said it would slow the car down. Then he never said another word about it. Race day. A church basement. Folding chairs, a long wooden track, a hundred families, a Scout leader with a whistle. Tucker's car came in last. Every heat. Dead last. Maybe the pencil line. Maybe the pennies. Maybe a tow truck just isn't built for speed. Tucker didn't cry. He stood at the bottom of the track and caught his car every single time like it had won. Then the Scout leader announced something that wasn't in the program. "One more race. Dads." Six men walked up to the track. Each of them was holding a Pinewood Derby car. Their own. From 1974. 1979. 1986. Dug out of attics and basements and, in one case, a tackle box. Chipped paint. Faded numbers. One still had a blue ribbon taped to the roof. They asked Tucker to race his car against them. The track had four lanes. Two heats. Three old cars at a time, and Tucker's little red tow truck right in the middle. The gate dropped. The three old cars rolled about two feet, wobbled, and fell over. Every one of them was missing a wheel. Second heat. Same thing. Two feet. Wobble. Over. Tucker's car rolled all the way down the track. Slowly. With its pencil line and its paper-clip hook. And it crossed the finish line alone. Six grown men threw their arms in the air and lost their minds like it was the Super Bowl. Kohei says the whole basement was laughing. And then nobody was. A hundred people on folding chairs, and the Scout leader had to blow his whistle twice to end the race, because the first time, nothing came out. Tucker is thirteen now. The car is on his dresser. The pencil line is still there. Kohei asked Mr. Petrakis, before he moved back to Japan, why six men would build a toy car for somebody else's boy. The old man shook his head. "Jesse built that car," he said. "We just held the pieces for him."