Samuel Beek knew he had a problem when he blew every fuse in his house. The culprit was an electric door opener he had built himself, guided by instructions for wiring and piecing together a device drummed up by ChatGPT . Turns out, the chatbot wasn’t so great at distinguishing between wet and dry connections, so the device he had built sent out a surge of misallocated power that zapped everything else. Oops.

Beek, based in Amsterdam , admits he is not a hardware guy. But he had that itch and now really just wanted to make something that wouldn’t explode.

“That's the difference: Your fuses blow out, or you have a solid product,” Beek says.…