An FRC team's app reads part numbers out of Onshape and guesses vendors by pattern, but a custom part named 'Spacer for am-1234' gets taken for bought, VEX is not in Purchasing's vendor list so it lands under Other, and manual fixes have to survive the next import. The patterns have not been checked against the team's real CAD.
Recurring agent failure issue in app (CtrlZ-FRC4096)
What engineers report
A recurring agent failure problem in app (CtrlZ-FRC4096) that mostly hits the mechanical designer.
Failure pattern: validation / failure
Analyst note
From the Grok pain-radar digests, Nov 9-10 2026 (Nov 9 7:41 AM ET through Nov 10 7:41 AM ET digests plus the Haitch editions). Verified live 2026-11-10: issue/PR read; title and state confirmed.
What it costs a team
Modeled annual cost
$30,000
For a team of 5
Prototype delay
3 days
Modeled schedule slip per occurrence
Time lost
240 min
Per engineer per month, about 1 incidents
How the cost is modeled
240 min/month × 5 engineers × 12 months = 240 hours × $125/hour = $30,000
A modeled estimate with medium confidence. Swap in your own team size and loaded rate to size it for your team.
Engineering tools that address it
No engineering tool profile lists this error yet. Browse tools that connect to app (CtrlZ-FRC4096).
Evidence
More recurring errors in app (CtrlZ-FRC4096)
- A FIRST robotics team tracks what to buy in a Slack List called "BOM List" in its build parts channel, with 38 items from April to October, 17 columns and 10 statuses. They're now building a Purchasing tab that copies it. PR #72 says it is "typed in by hand, separate from the BOM, which comes from Onshape." Open questions include whether Price is per item or per line, and the BOM README says costs are mentors-only while the Slack list shows prices to everyone. Linking items back to the BOM is step 5 of 6. Small team, same pattern as big ones.MCAD · impact 74
- A FIRST robotics team tracks what to buy in a Slack List called "BOM List" in its build parts channel, with 38 items from April to October, 17 columns and 10 statuses. They're now building a Purchasing tab that copies it. PR #72 says it is "typed in by hand, separate from the BOM, which comes from Onshape." Open questions include whether Price is per item or per line, and the BOM README says costs are mentors-only while the Slack list shows prices to everyone. Linking items back to the BOM is step 5 of 6. Small team, same pattern as big ones.MCAD · impact 74
- A robotics team's homegrown BOM tool crashes ("BOM stopped working") after every Onshape import, because newer Chrome returns a Promise from scrollIntoView and React then tries to call it as cleanup. The parts still save. The tests run in Node, so they never caught it.PDM · impact 66
- Writing part numbers into Onshape's Part number property only works in a workspace, not a version, breaking the one-part-number-everywhere plan.PLM · impact 66
Sourced from public community reports. Costs and delays are modeled estimates, not measurements. Know a better source or a fix? Tell us at hello@productflo.io.