As the Lead for the Engineers for a Sustainable World (ESW) PETBot project, my co-lead and I faced the challenge of resurrecting an abandoned system designed to recycle plastic bottles into 3D printer filament. While I focused on the physical hardware—integrating motors and sensors via an Arduino Mega—we had to decipher fragmented legacy code to customize the Marlin firmware. We leveraged AI as a knowledge-recovery tool to rapidly analyze the previous team’s work and untangle the software architecture. This was a direct exercise in Efficiency—using AI not to generate new features, but to reverse-engineer past progress, saving us weeks of stalled development and getting the system back on track.
