“We know more than we can tell.” — Michael Polanyi Once, while bringing up a TI TDA4x board with an 8MP sensor, we got pure garbage output. The OpenVX code looked fine. Nothing in the manual explained it. But from the visual pattern of the corrupted frames, it felt like certain ISP modules weren't running due to a clock-timing mismatch. I bypassed the OpenVX handshake loop to force the next module to execute—and the ISP came alive, proving the sensor clock was off. Veteran engineers rely on this tacit intuition every day. Yet when a bug is closed, only the final commit survives. Today's coding agents can navigate repos, but they stall at cross-layer reality. If we can capture the latent knowledge, agentic tools won't just write code—they'll help debug hardware too.
When autonomous agents break into websites, we should ask the same question a parent would ask: is this a milestone worth celebrating, or behavior that needs a boundary?
Three lenses, eight “pro lenses” — how the iPhone 17 Pro turns three physical cameras into seven zoom stops plus macro, and where optical-quality zoom really comes from.
Why the same object can be ordinary in one setting and extraordinary in another — and what a hotel ceiling in Québec City has to do with Ming-dynasty garden design.
