YacineMTB Races Through Drone Side Project With Automated R&D
On November 3, Yacine MTB fired off a string of tweets, live-documenting the final sprint of his side project: making a drone fly autonomously on "dog shit compute" (his words). After spending about 10 hours setting up a test harness and defining the problem, a week of "automated R&D" ran "insanely well." He plans a few more 4 a.m. wake-ups to finish 3D printing and soldering, declaring "we're about to nail it."
Confirmed
- Yacine says that since his newborn arrived he's had almost no disposable time for side projects; his wife gave him one full Sunday, and he made breakthrough progress that day
- The project is a hobby effort to "get a drone flying on terrible compute," using an "automated R&D" approach: about 10 hours to build the harness and frame the problem, after which the system ran well
- He live-tweeted the process ("can't believe I'm live tweeting this"), noting that hardware finishing work — 3D printing and soldering — remains, with an estimated three more sprint days to completion
- beffjezos responded that this is exactly the AI-driven hardware R&D trend he anticipated
Unconfirmed
- Specific technical details, the models used, and the configuration of the "terrible compute" are undisclosed; the full "automated R&D" workflow rests solely on the author's account, with no code or demos as proof
Why it matters
- beffjezos and others see this as a vivid example of AI accelerating hardware and engineering R&D: a small amount of human time spent on scaffolding lets an automated system do the bulk of the research
- For individual developers, it shows how automated tools can advance a complex hardware project under extreme time constraints — in this case, a single Sunday squeezed in around childcare
2026-11-03 ~ 2026-11-03 · 5 related posts
Primary sources
- [source] Yacine MTB says baby nuked his time but a Sunday off yielded 'ridiculous progress' on his drone hobby project — yacineMTB · 2026-11-03
- Yacine: 10 hours of harness setup unlocked wild progress on his dog-shit-compute drone project — yacineMTB · 2026-11-03
- [source] yacineMTB: A Week of Automated R&D Works Scarily Well on Hardware Project — yacineMTB · 2026-11-03
- [source] yacineMTB Live-Tweets Final Sprint of His Automated R&D Project — yacineMTB · 2026-11-03
- Yacine makes surprising progress flying drones on weak compute — beffjezos · 2026-11-03