Mr. Pending, a Snail Engineer, Tests AI-Designed Machines to Press One Button

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A developer built The Department of Unnecessary Engineering, a playful project in which a snail character named Mr. Pending must press a blue button through an elaborate chain of machines. Behind the joke, a small open-weight AI model, Gemma, designs contraptions from parts like ramps and conveyors, and a deterministic simulator checks whether they actually work. When a machine fails, the AI proposes repairs and tries again. In a small test, the E2B model succeeded in 2 of 15 builds with an improved prompt, while the larger E4B model succeeded 4 of 15 but used considerably more memory. The project was released as open source on GitHub, with the simulator, evaluation results and local setup instructions included.

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