Opinion
Wagner: Hardware design tooling has barely improved since the mid-nineties
“And I had this realization that the tooling to make hardware had not improved in my lifetime. And that was so odd because the tooling to make software is like unrecognizable if you compare it to like mid nineties or something like that, right?”
Insight
Wagner: Fine-tuned open-source models can beat frontier models on quality
“I think you're now with, you know, we'll be seeing the trend going also with the coding agents, you know, fine-tuning open source models and like way faster as a result and more accurate. You can actually beat frontier models on quality that way.”
Opinion
Wagner: Prompt management startups fail because the problem isn't well-understood
“I also think the reason why these startups haven't done well so far is I don't think we understand the problem well enough yet. To abstract a generalizable solution. Right. And I think that's where everybody is stuck.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Wagner predicts AI automation will end the traditional OEM manufacturing model
“Yeah, wherever you look, where there's electronics and automation, right, are coming for that, you know, and I think this is the end for most categories of the OAM model, ultimately.”
What-if
Building a custom IDE would cost AI coding startups $100M
“If like Cursor or Devon would have to build their own VS code, that'd cost a hundred million dollars, you know? Call me back in five years.”
Assertion Contradicted
Wagner claims Flux shipped embedded AI chat before GPT-4 released
“So I think I'm going to claim here, I think we were the first engineering tool or design tool that had an AI chat in it. We shipped that I think a month or two months before GPT-IV became publicly available.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Wagner: Reliable LLM tool calling in late 2023 unlocked functional agents
“And I would say like that tool calling, I think really only became reliable about a year ago, like last October, November, when the models that shipped were suddenly really good at calling tools. And I think that then changed everything, right? And you see tha…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Flux's AI agent finds electronic component replacements in under a minute
“This is going to take here, 30, 60 seconds, hopefully. And it's like, this would have taken us hours to do manually.”
Insight
Wagner: Task-specific knowledge injection effectively reduces LLM hallucinations
“The way to, like, get them to behave the way we want them to behave is just with context engineering and injecting the right knowledge for the right kind of tasks they're doing. And that's incredibly effective, right? That reduces hallucinations, that makes th…”
Opinion
Wagner says Devin's 'Ask' function is its most underrated feature
“Now we use Devon here religiously, and I think one of the most underrated features of Devon is the actual ask feature.”
Insight
Wagner: AI agent output quality heavily depends on upfront requirement specifications
“I think a lot of success depends how well you flesh out what you wanna do, right? Like if you just use this and ask it to like start here executing a plan, it's gonna be high variability in what you're gonna get back, right? But the more we go through here and…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Flux reached 7,000 paying customers and grew 26x year-over-year
“So we have 7000 paying customers today. That's like, you know, it's grown, it's like 26 X versus last year.”
Disclosure
Flux shipped an autonomous agent for hardware board design in October
“And so that then led us to Really like heavily invest in the agenda capability in Flux, right? And going from like a, hey, look, I can answer questions and perform single tasks to like, no, I can take a product brief, break that down into an actual execution p…”
Insight
One out-of-stock component can delay an entire hardware project 200 days
“And when you have a design with say, 500 components, and one of them is not on stock or there's a lead time of 200 days, then the whole project has a lead time now of 200 days, right?”
Assertion Partly supported
Flux boasts a user-generated library of over one million electronic parts
“So we have our own library for all these parts, over a million. That's all user generated.”
Disclosure
Wagner admits Flux's knowledge-base architecture was inspired by Cognition's Devin
“We love Devin here. Yeah, I mean, I know a lot here is inspired by Devon, like the knowledge-based thing, right, is inspired by Devon, right?”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Flux's autonomous hardware engineering agent runs for 25 minutes on average
“So yeah, the average session is I think, 25 minutes.”
