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How Anthropic is helping small businesses
How can a two-person fabrication studio make room for problems it’s never solved before?
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A used milling machine arrived at the shop with a manual written only in German. As a small shop, “we can't necessarily afford to go out and buy big machinery that we'd like to have... we end up buying cast-off machinery,” says Joe Bacus. The manufacturer no longer existed, so there was no one to call for support. Joe scanned the manual and used Claude to translate and troubleshoot it until the machine was running. "However you get there, it's problem solving," Joe says. "It's just like, how do you get from point A to point B."
Joe Bacus and Leef Armontrout met at the City Museum in St. Louis, where they worked under artist Bob Cassilly on one of the largest immersive sculpture environments in the country. When the museum changed hands during the pandemic and the work dried up, people kept calling and asking them to build things.
BLA Studios was founded in 2020. Their work ranges from furniture, public art, and architectural restoration to terracotta repair on historic homes after last year's tornadoes. The company is still just the two of them, and they’ve never needed to advertise. "Take a giant metal object and turn it into a bench, that's easy," Joe says. "Writing an email to somebody, that's the hard thing."
Joe and Leef are building a robotic welding arm from scratch. "We're tinkerers," Joe says. "I want to figure out how to build something instead of spending $100,000 on an arm, and be able to build it ourselves." Normally these arms need precise jigs to hold each joint in place. They're using a depth camera instead, which can locate the joint and adjust the weld path in real time. They know how to build the mechanical side, but the microcontroller programming to let the arm weld on its own is new to them, and Joe is working through it in Claude Code. "Two years ago, I would never have thought we would be putting together and programming our own robot arm that knows how to weld,” Joe says.
"A lot of people just think that you're putting in a prompt and getting an answer," he says. "And usually that answer is not the best. It's more like, here's an idea, let's build on it, and that usually turns into a better product." When the shop kept losing material cutting shapes into steel, they used Claude to build a custom nesting program that fits the most pieces onto every sheet.
"We wanted to build into our company the ability to have space for play, and that allows us, if we're able to steal that time away, to do good for our community."
Co-founder, BLA Studios
Two blocks from the shop, Joe and Leef built a basketball hoop for a local nonprofit. "That's the joy, just building something and seeing a kid go crazy around it," Joe says. Neighbors bring in a bent handrail or a small fix they can't afford elsewhere, and Joe and Leef take care of it.
A few years ago, the city removed bus benches and shelters across St. Louis in a campaign that hit certain neighborhoods harder than others. A local nonprofit hired Joe and Leef to build a new shelter and bench for one of those stops. Closer to home, they are planning more community improvements, including replacement benches that utilize salvaged material.
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"The better we do as a business, the more good we can do for those around us."
Co-founder, BLA Studios
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