AI Agentic Engineering - Claude Code

[YoDoug]

I have a new Automation cell I am working on the control system design and programming. the cell is an Okuma MB5000HII horizontal. There are two tombstones with one face of each having Schunk VeroS for robot loaded pallets. The cell has 240 (24" * 10") pallets. There are two separate load station each having two places for pallets. Layout pic below.



I have decided to go full agentic engineering to fully test the capabilities of Claude Code. this cells has;

1. PC with control software for setting pallets assignments, scheduling, and load station controls.
2. Structured text lang PLC as master control.
3. Safety PLC in Okuma to act as the APC safety control for robot/manual APC functions.
4. C# Okuma API app for data transfer to/from Okuma control to Master PLC.
5. ABB  robot control with AnyBus EIP interface to master PLC.
6. Turck RFID reader for Pallet tags.

I use Google Antigravity as my main IDE for programming with the Claude Code extension. I started an extended conversation with Claude code discussing the cell, layout, devices, etc. I had Claude make a skill.md file as the complete cell overview, plan, etc. This file lives in the master level folder. There are sub folders for Each device, ControlApp, PST lang PLC, ABB robot, etc. Claude is able to maintain complete awareness of each device and their IO points and programming through the skill.md. I can simply ask Claude to make a plan to add a signal/process for a specific function, discuss the process flow and IO points. It will map out the plan then when I give it the go ahead it will spin up a team of agents and add the programming to each device. It can do all the PC apps (C#, React, etc), ABB Rapid code, ST PLC code all very well. It will also maintain the skill.md to keep all new functions and info updated and it even has Git control for revision tracking. I still review almost all of the code. I review 100% of ABB and PLC code as these have safety concerns. I test accordingly. It really understands ABB Rapid code and ST lang PLC code well. It does have it's limitations. You still need to know some electrical/controls engineering knowledge and the specifics of each device and how you want to send/receive data to help it through the process. It fully understands Modbus/EIP/MQTT/etc., but you need to guide it how you want your project structured. It's not quite ready to do this all on it's own and fully take my job. However, I am seriously amazed at how much time and how much help this is in keeping a big project like this organized. It even makes great operator and maintenance docs from the skill.md file. Screenshot of project layout in Antigravity below.

[YoDoug]

Couple screenshots of the Control App

[Zoffen]

This is amazing!

[megatronprime]

Nice, does anthropics designation as a supply chain risk limit how you use it?

[megatronprime]

Does this mean you ditched Gemini btw?

[YoDoug]

Nice, does anthropics designation as a supply chain risk limit how you use it?

Not for me. Nothing we do here is security controlled like AS/Mil-spec. We make our own products and make our own automation to make our product. According to Anthropics licensing, our company data is treated as proprietary, meaning our competition can't just ask Claude to reproduce what we have here. They would still need to go through the same agentic engineering process I did to get the same results.

[YoDoug]

Does this mean you ditched Gemini btw?

For coding, yes. I have found Claude produces better code with fewer errors. For a while I was using Gemini to do the planning and then pushing the plan to Claude for code, but since working with Skills files, it is easier to just use Claude for all of it. I do still use NotebookLM occasionally and I use Nano-Banana to make graphics for APP UI and for operator docs but other than that I don't use Gemini much. I had to bump up my Anthropic plan to the max tokens because I kept hitting limits, but I turned my Gemini back to pro instead of Ultra.

[Here's Johnny!]

This is wild stuff. Impressed!!!

[TylerBeer]

Claude is great, I'm using it for something similar with Node.Red

[YoDoug]

Claude is great, I'm using it for something similar with Node.Red

Have you tried Claude with ABB Rapid yet? Pull a backup from one of your ABB's, give that folder to Claude code. Ask it to review .cfg and code files. Depending on how well you name your variables/etc. it will give you a crazy accurate breakdown of your process. Then ask it to review for bugs, bad code, slow processes, etc. It is seriously good at ABB Rapid. So far I have only had one time that it came up with bad syntax and couldn't get past it on it's own. That was some pretty complicated pose trans commands.

[Elmer Fudd]