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30 Agents Every AI Engineer Must Build
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The world is its own best model.
Rodney Brooks, co-founder of iRobot and former director of MIT CSAIL
In 1966, researchers at Stanford set a wheeled robot named Shakey loose in a corridor and watched it reason about pushing blocks. The lesson was immediate: intelligence that acts in the physical world earns every decision against gravity, friction, and consequence. NASA's Sojourner rover crossed Martian terrain three decades later under the same constraint. Today, autonomous drones navigate storms and construction sites with no human at the controls. Each system confirms what Shakey established: intelligence confined to a screen is a different kind of problem entirely.
This qualitative difference creates what we call the physicality constraint. Digital agents operate in environments where state changes are often virtual and reversible. In contrast, physical agents face the uncompromising laws of physics; objects have mass...