With the industrial world sprinting toward smarter automation, Beckhoff has launched its latest leap: TwinCAT-CoAgent, a new agentic AI assistant now entering closed beta testing. Naturally, this raises an important question: Is it a helpful engineering co-pilot… or the intern who never sleeps and threatens your entire department’s job security?

As one of the few with early access, we have a unique opportunity to put CoAgent through its paces. This is a chance to explore how an embedded agentic AI might reshape industrial engineering workflows — from suggesting code snippets to possibly replacing that one guy who still refuses to use version control.

In the spirit of google's 10X concept, we now face a bold new hypothesis: Can CoAgent make one engineer do the work of ten? Or more bluntly: Is this the beginning of the end for the 9 other engineers on the team? In short: If we're all going to be replaced by agentic AI, we might as well be the ones who wrote its performance review.

GOALS:

• Design and implement benchmark tasks for the TwinCAT-CoAgent
• Prototype new AI-augmented workflows
• Identify limitations, risks, and failure modes
• Provide practical recommendations

HELPFUL PRIOR KNOWLEDGE:

• Basic Understanding of Industrial Automation
• Interest to get familiar with TwinCAT and Agentic AI Concepts
• Lecture Information and Automation Technology