What I learned

If a friend asked me what to know before starting, I would say this.

• Prove the chain with a small pilot. 45 episodes were never going to be enough, but they showed that recording, upload, training and the arm all connect.
• Record what the robot will meet. It does not learn "pick" and "place" as ideas. It imitates, so show it full boards in the scene it will play in.
• It copies your habits too. I paused before every move, and the model learned to pause.
• Same motion every time. Same path, same grip, same speed. Delete the bad episodes.
• Measure before you copy a recipe. One borrowed setting made my arm jump. A log found it, one flag fixed it.
• Log every command. My first run on the arm was not logged, so there is nothing to look at.
• Try the model alone first. The plain rollout command, then the game script, then Claude. A fault has fewer places to hide.
• Type every recording command in full. I reused one from the shell history and labelled three episodes with the wrong sentence.
• Test without the arm on a port that does not exist. A test of mine once reached the real arm by accident.
• Keep the language model away from the motors. Claude picks one of nine cells. Code writes the sentence.
• Count honestly. Ten moves are ten moves, not a success rate.