Working with hardware has always been tough. But over the last 2 years, the emergence of the SO-101 arm and the rise of AI agent architectures have opened up a new way to experiment -one that dramatically shortens the loop between idea and physical action.

In this session, I will briefly cover assembling and setting up the SO-101, then spend most of the time on: how AI agents can talk to and control the hardware. Starting with Claude Code and Codex, I will show how builders can create their own agents and then use MCP to connect them directly to the arm and issue movement instructions.

All scripts, implementations, and the MCP server used in this session are available at github.com/anshuman-dev/so101-project. The repo is actively being improved to make it more structured and easier for others to pick up and build on.

The bigger idea here is accessibility. Traditionally, operating robot arms required learning specialized, poorly-maintained software with long feedback loops. With AI agents and MCP as the interface layer, that barrier drops significantly. Builders, enthusiasts, and curious generalists can now go from zero to moving a robot arm without needing a robotics background.