There are now two types of robotics founders and the split matters more than consumer vs. industrial. A growing wave of software engineers are building robots, but they're bringing software expectations with them: simulation should work like Vercel, hardware talent should be sourceable via API, and if CAD takes three months to learn, they'll find a workaround in three days. The gap between what they expect and what exists is enormous. There's no Common Crawl for robotics data. Selling hardware is nothing like selling SaaS. And the entire tooling stack was built for people willing to spend weeks wiring things together. That gap is where the next generation of robotics infrastructure companies gets built. Diego Prats | 🤖 (@mexitlan) Are you fleeing to robotics because Claude Code cooked your job? Yeah… me neither… 😅… As part of building in the open, here are some more learnings from the physical AI ecosystem: Folks under-estimate the number of pain points and problems worth solving for the software-first robotics founder persona! — https://nitter.net/mexitlan/status/2039870415401836773#m

→ View original post on X — @whiteafrican, 2026-04-03 13:15 UTC