What CarlBot Can't Do
CarlBot is good at the tedious part of building a show. This page is about everything else, which is to say the part of the job that's yours. Read it before the list of what it can do, because it's the more important of the two.
It has no taste
CarlBot can't tell you whether a scare lands, whether a puzzle is fair, whether the reveal should hold for two seconds or four, or whether the room needs one more beat of silence before the drop. It lays out what you describe. Deciding what to describe, and knowing when it's right, is the craft, and the craft is yours.
Ask it "make this scarier" and it will ask you what you mean, because it genuinely doesn't know.
It doesn't know your guests
CarlBot has never met the people who walk through your attraction. It doesn't know what your crowd finds fun, what makes them jump, or what makes a kid's eyes go wide. It doesn't know that your Saturday-night groups are rowdy teenagers and your Sunday-afternoon groups are families with strollers, or that the locals have seen the drop wall three years running and need something new. What reads as scary, magical, or delightful to a real person in a real room is something you learn by watching them. CarlBot never will.
It has no hands
CarlBot can't wire a relay, mount a controller, bleed an air line, re-seat a loose WAGO, or fix the prop that keeps sticking on the third cycle. It has never been in your room. It only knows what's in your IgorBox Studio: the names you gave things, the shows you've built, the transcripts you've saved. If the fog machine is labeled "Fog" but is actually plugged into the strobe's relay, CarlBot has no way to know that. You do.
It has no eyes or ears on the night
CarlBot doesn't watch the show run, hear the crowd, or notice that the actor is hitting the trigger a half-second late. It doesn't know the room is too bright for the UV to read, or that the scream track is clipping through the cheap speaker. Everything that happens between the controller and the guest is invisible to it. Walking the room, running it hot, and adjusting on the night are things a person does.
It can't touch hardware without you
Nothing CarlBot does reaches a real controller until you click. Deploying a show or rule waits for Yes, go ahead. Starting or stopping a show, or changing a controller's front button or ambient show, waits for Apply, and only while you have that controller's page open. It can't fire individual outputs at all, and it can't use Manual Control. The moment something moves in the real world, it's because you decided it should.
It can't do more than you can
Your role in IgorBox Studio is the ceiling. A Viewer's CarlBot answers questions and changes nothing. An Editor's CarlBot can lay out shows and rules but can't deploy without deploy rights. Nobody's CarlBot can change firmware, network settings, tokens, or relay modes. Every change it does make follows your permissions and is logged with your name and an AI marker in the audit log.
It doesn't know you
CarlBot works from what's in your IgorBox Studio and the memory your team chooses to give it with Remember this. It doesn't keep a profile of you. What it knows is what's in your IgorBox Studio and the memory your team chooses to save. Each conversation is private to you, and old ones are cleared automatically after a period without activity.
It can be wrong
CarlBot is AI. It can misread a request, put a clip on the wrong track, or draft a rule with the timer backwards. That's why every change it makes is listed in the chat as it happens, why the risky ones stop and ask, and why "undo your last change" is always one sentence away. Look over its work before you deploy, the same way you'd check anyone's work before it goes in front of guests.
It's still your show
Here's the honest version of what CarlBot is for. Show building has two kinds of work in it. One kind is deciding what should happen: the timing, the misdirection, the moment the guest realizes the wall is moving. The other kind is dragging clips into place, connecting nodes, and lining a jaw up to a voice track for the fourth time this week.
You hand CarlBot the second kind. Not because you can't do it, but because it's tedious and you have better things to do with the hour. The first kind was never on the table and it never will be. That's the job, and it's yours.
Ready for the details? See What CarlBot Can Do.