Can AI build a jet engine? JARVIS Challenge tests role of AI copilots…

MIT's JARVIS Challenge tasked undergraduate teams with designing and building a jet engine in four weeks using AI as their primary engineering partner. The experiment revealed that while AI accelerates design cycles, engineering judgment and manufacturing remain the decisive constraints—AI-native engineering means leading AI tools, not simply using them. If you're building hardware design tools or manufacturing automation, watch where students hit the wall: AI got them past theory and CAD, but hallucinations and lack of physical intuition killed momentum in week 2. The real market is not replacing engineers—it's the manufacturing step that's now the bottleneck worth solving.