FixItBench: the joke benchmark where robot-agent teams race to repair electron microscopes
teortaxesTex · x · 2026-10-26
A thread imagining AI's next frontier: old scientific gear dumped as scrap for lack of docs, proprietary software, and parts will become trivially restorable as agents rewrite software, design FPGA replacements, order from JLCPCB/CNC, and implement SOTA algorithms — yielding better hardware at 1/20 the price. The retort proposes "FixItBench": humanoid robot + coding agent teams competing to repair the most scanning electron microscopes per day on the smallest budget, illustrated by a satirical scatter chart pitting fictional CN stacks (Qwen/DeepSeek/GLM/Kimi × Unitree/Zhiyuan) against US stacks (Gemini/Claude/GPT × Atlas).
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