a16z's Erin Price-Wright says factory technicians can now retool production lines with AI in 20 minutes, a job that used to take an outside integrator 3 months: "Historically, if you're setting up a line with a lot of automation, you really need to be producing a lot of one single thing. That's how you get the cost down, and how you justify investing in a pretty bespoke manufacturing line." "But what we're seeing across our portfolio is that manufacturing technicians themselves have the intuition, and now the software tools, to change the economics of producing low-volume, high-mix on the line." "A manufacturing technician, not necessarily someone with a college degree or who's studied software engineering, can now use these tools to reprogram and reconfigure their lines on the fly, because they understand the manufacturing process." "Instead of calling a systems integrator, which takes 3 months and hundreds of thousands of dollars to reconfigure a line, you can have a manufacturing engineer use Claude and do that in 20 minutes. That's been a real game changer." @espricewright