The idea for jipeto came to me when I realised that I would probably never have enough time in my life to create all the things I imagine. This has always been the case - I have a very active imagination - but the difference is that now, there are incredibly powerful tools available to help take some of the busy work out of the process of making those ideas a real, physical reality.

AI agents, when used within strict frameworks of operation, can now greatly speed up the process of writing software. I know this from experience, being a software developer day-to-day. My frustration with the current state of play is that AI agents are entirely disembodied, unable to interact with the physical world (or actually really understand how it works at all). This means that using agents as a tool for firmware development is frustratingly slow, involving a great deal of back and forth, pointing out stupid assumptions on the agent's part (cf: literally no common sense), uploading, testing, iterating, etc. 

I began to think - wouldn't it be so much easier if the agent had the ability to test and iterate without my intervention? LLMs have the ability to understand images and video pretty well, and can interact with services through servers that expose tools using the Model Context Protocol. 

In-Circuit Testing has been a thing for decades, and Flying Probe Testing is offered by pretty much every PCB fab house out there - both ways of testing physical hardware to make sure it functions as intended. If I could hook up one of these systems to an MCP server, I'd be onto a winner. But also, they cost upwards of $10,000 and I don't have access to one.

The solution was obviously to build my own. And thus, jipeto was born.