David Nichols of Loupe explains what actually changed in automation engineering this year, and why control retrofits just got far cheaper.
Nearly twenty years into building high performance controls, David Nichols is blunt about what AI did to his business: what used to take six weeks now takes two, and his team ships roughly five times more software per sprint. An engineer dropped the raw documentation from a failing robotic cell into a folder, asked Claude for a state diagram, and got a reverse engineered flow chart in thirty minutes that beat anything the customer had. The error recovery gap causing the downtime was visible right there in the chart. A SASE member handed a model a hundred page ethernet specification and got working code for every function, plus tests, on the first try. That was a six week project. It took a day.
The implication is the sharpest part of the conversation. Software rewrites used to be the dumbest thing an engineer could propose, because software was expensive and full of unknowns. That logic has inverted. If a rewrite takes a week and produces better documentation, better tests, and better coverage, then brownfield modernization stops being a risk calculation. His words: open season on old controllers. For an industry sitting on Windows 7 machines and undocumented cells one PC failure away from stopping a line, that is a different economic picture entirely.
Vlad walks David through the full project lifecycle, and the answers stay practical. Discovery becomes a context gathering exercise where interview transcripts and a drawer full of legacy PDFs turn into control diagrams and proposals in days. Development becomes worth treating as a real software engineering project, because source control, digital twins, and automated testing are exactly what these models are fluent in. David is equally direct about platforms: the bottleneck in automation was never technical, it is cultural. His analogy is a shop that insists on carburetors because that is what the technicians know. The close tackles the chat's harder questions, including what is left of a software moat once building software is trivial. His book pick is Richard Rhodes and The Making of the Atomic Bomb.
About David Nichols
David Nichols is co-founder of Loupe, a West Coast automation engineering and systems integration company he started in 2007. Loupe does high performance controls work across aerospace, semiconductors, and metal cutting, built largely on the B&R Industrial Automation platform. He also founded SASE, the Society of Automation Software Engineers, a free community of roughly two thousand engineers. This is his fourth appearance on Manufacturing Hub, following episodes 29, 53, and 127.
https://loupe.team
Timestamps
0:00 Introduction
2:45 Loupe, 20 years of controls, and the SASE community
8:40 Carburetors in industrial automation: culture, not technology
11:20 The ChatGPT moment versus the Claude Code moment
20:20 Inside an integrator: six week sprints become two
21:30 Reverse engineering a robotic cell in 30 minutes
26:10 A 100 page ethernet spec turned into working code in a day
27:50 Does this change who gets to be a builder
40:40 AI across the project lifecycle from discovery to handoff
49:00 How to actually get started, and what to prompt
53:20 If software is no longer a moat, what is
57:50 Predict the future, career advice, and the book pick
References
SASE:
https://sase.spaceClaude:
https://claude.aiClaude Code:
https://claude.com/claude-codeSendCutSend:
https://sendcutsend.comAcquired Podcast:
https://www.acquired.fmAbout Your Hosts
Vladimir Romanov is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and the founder of Joltek, an independent manufacturing and industrial automation consulting firm specializing in modernization strategy, digital transformation, and workforce development. Joltek works with manufacturers and investors to de-risk modernization and build the internal capability to sustain results.
Connect with Vlad: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladromanov/
Want to go deeper? Vlad and the team at Joltek have covered related topics here:
Control System Modernization Strategy:
https://www.joltek.com/blog/control-system-modernization-strategyEdge Computing and AI Value from Manufacturing Data:
https://www.joltek.com/blog/edge-computing-ai-value-manufacturing-dataDave Griffith is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and founder of Capelin Solutions, an industrial automation firm helping manufacturers adopt smart manufacturing technology. He brings 15 years of experience in industrial automation and digital transformation.
Connect with Dave: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davegriffith23/
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