Over five days on a humanoid robot's left arm, requirements (a 5 kg sweep, the hand bay, a clean outer skin) arrived after CAD had started and each forced a redo. Print checks were added one at a time, each after a defect reached a print, including a 1 mm interference and stale FEA reported as a pass, and what a print taught them lived only in chat.
Recurring agent failure issue in roark (jaylamping)
What engineers report
A recurring agent failure problem in roark (jaylamping) that mostly hits the mechanical designer.
Failure pattern: validation / failure
Analyst note
From the Grok pain-radar digests, Nov 8-9 2026 (Nov 8 8:41 AM ET through Nov 9 6:41 AM ET digests plus the Haitch editions). Verified live 2026-11-09: 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 roark (jaylamping).
Evidence
More recurring errors in roark (jaylamping)
- Moving the rev B5 power board (E-stop banks, limb breakers) between repos exposed that check.py, the sims and the build script did not fail when a check failed or did not run. A 'parity: 0 differences' result is now marked untrusted because the old import stage ran parity with no schematic beside the board and hid KiCad's output.ECAD · impact 74
- On a 54 V power board, the schematic-parity check never ran in the layout folder, hiding a stale J24 pinout. Turning it on produced 70 parity warnings and J24 pads 6 to 12 had to be re-netted and re-routed, while DRC reported 0 shorts the whole time.ECAD · impact 74
- Roark's left arm CAD moved over from a repo called marengo, but the halves are named shell_front and shell_back while the scripts call them upper and lower, joined by a mapping file. The FEA scripts, master part script and forearm checks did not come over, and ua_parts.py has not been rerun from the new paths because it needs a SolidWorks rebuild. A test fixture used to copy the real exports.json, so the first real export broke a test.MCAD · impact 74
- Claude Code scripted and auto-routed a six-layer power distribution board. DRC passes with 0 clearance violations, yet 67 connections on 45 nets are still open, with a 4 to 7 hour hand-finish estimate, and VBUS copper is about 24 mm against 27.5 mm needed.ECAD · impact 66
- Once CAD went into git, two failures stayed silent: an export can drift from the part it was made from, and a committed assembly can point at a file nobody else has. The fix is a script that hashes the export and its source part into a manifest, plus a SolidWorks API check that fails missing, scratch, gitignored or uncommitted references.MCAD · impact 66
- Power board routing stalled with about 150 nets open. Gate clamp zeners sat about 15 mm from their FETs and 65 GND pads had no path to the plane, and the review fixes have not yet been run in KiCad.ECAD · 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.