July 2025
Uncovered 🔍
I owe you for getting the last press release to you late. So here’s the next one early. Because it matters.
Next Tuesday, we’re announcing something that’s been years in the making: a completely new way of approaching engineering and production. We’re calling it CHOPS (Continuous Hardware Operations). It’s the result of a long-running conversation with Callye, one of the owners of Kform, a small, sharp US manufacturer focused on defense.
Callye and I have been talking for years about how broken the system is. How hard it still is to turn an idea into a working product. COVID, Ukraine, rising protectionism…. they’ve all exposed the fragility in supply chains, and how slow and opaque our current tools are when needs shift suddenly. The problem isn’t just technical. It’s that too much of the process is hidden, undocumented, and siloed. We can’t adapt quickly if we can’t see clearly. That’s where CHOPS comes in.
CHOPS is about transparency. It’s about continuity. It’s about capturing engineering and manufacturing as a single, living process. One continuous stream of data: Design files, of course, but also emails, chat messages, ERP entries, task boards, decisions, risks, and tradeoffs. Not just what got done, but why it got done.
Here’s what that means in practice:
You get live traceability across the full lifecycle: requirements, design, prototyping, manufacturing.
Every decision gets captured at the source, building a persistent context for the product.
That context becomes fuel for AI—highlighting risks, delays, bottlenecks, and cost drivers.
And it connects seamlessly with the tools teams already use: CAD, MES, ERP, MBSE, and more.
We’ve already seen how powerful this can be in our work with the DOD. Just being able to keep everyone on the same page is a game changer. But the real value is long-term. Most manufacturing packages today can’t be reused. You can’t recreate the process behind the part. Assembly steps, material tweaks, even the glue someone used. It’s rarely documented. So, when you try to redesign, scale, or reverse engineer, you’re forced back to first principles. CHOPS changes that. It gives your future self the full picture.
I am thankful that we have a great partner to deliver this new framework with. Kform is a small, family run company helping defense related organizations rapidly iterate new products. It’s the perfect environment to experiment with new solutions.
Amazing partners is also the hallmark of our recent AI endeavours. For the first time ever, we’re building a completely new product with our customers – Whisper.
Whisper captures the context of collaboration without interrupting it. It runs in the background, tagging, categorizing, and securing data—then makes it available to Threads, copilots, chatbots, and other tools. It supports:
Live Gantt charts that update themselves
Automatically generated reports and templates
Chat-based project insights
Action and task tracking
Syncing with PLM and innovation platforms
Even digital fingerprinting to trace ideas
People have been saying we need to shift from “prompt engineering” to “context engineering.” Whisper is that shift. And we’re just getting started.
The kickoff meeting for Whisper happened ten days ago. If you want to be part of shaping it, let me know.
I have a whole host of incredible product improvements the team has made to tell you about, but I have utterly run out of space, time and your patience. So they will have to wait until next time. I’m off to Stockholm for a few days on islands. Wish me luck. I always get in trouble out there.