Will DIY culture grow once AI robots can fix almost anything

[LurkerPrime]

Home robotics and AI powered repair assistance are both genuinely improving fast. Guided repair apps that can visually diagnose a problem through your phone camera already exist in early form, which raises a real question worth thinking through, does that trend actually shrink DIY culture by making manual skills less necessary, or does it actually grow DIY culture by lowering the barrier to entry for people who previously felt too intimidated to attempt a repair themselves.

The historical precedent genuinely cuts both ways here, YouTube tutorials already dramatically lowered the barrier to DIY repair over the past fifteen years and that clearly grew the hobby significantly rather than making it obsolete. But automated dishwashers and washing machines also genuinely reduced how many people ever learn basic appliance repair skills at all compared to earlier generations.

The likely honest answer is that AI assisted repair probably grows DIY participation specifically among people who want the genuine satisfaction of fixing something themselves but currently lack the confidence or specific knowledge to actually attempt it. While genuinely reducing DIY participation among people who were only ever doing repairs out of pure economic necessity rather than any real interest in the process itself.

There is also a real possibility that actual physical robotic repair. An autonomous system that can genuinely fix a leaky pipe or a broken appliance without any human involvement whatsoever, stays genuinely far off for most home contexts even as diagnostic and guidance AI matures quickly, since the actual physical dexterity and adaptability required for unpredictable real world repair work remains a genuinely much harder robotics problem than diagnosis or guidance alone.

Curious what people here in the actual DIY community think. Whether AI assistance has already changed how you personally approach a repair project, and whether you think the actual hands on satisfaction of fixing something yourself survives even once a machine could theoretically do it for you instead