When I tell people there are no drivers in Synthia — not in the traditional sense — they kind of look at me like I said something wrong.

But it's actually one of the things I'm most happy about in the whole design.
Think about it this way. Normally when you add a new piece of hardware to a system, right, you need a driver. Someone has to sit down and write code that tells the system how to talk to that specific device. Which is fine, it works, that's how basically everything works. But it also means that every new component you want to support is a software engineering task. Someone has to do the work. And if that someone isn't you, you're just waiting.
We went a different way. Every component in Synthia sits on the same bus — we call it TINIA, Timed Noise-Immune Array — and everything talks the same protocol. Every sensor, every actuator, same bus, same protocol. And instead of a driver, what you write is a description. A markdown file. You describe what the device does, what commands it accepts, what it responds to. The AI reads that and figures out how to use it. So effectively adding hardware becomes a documentation task, not a software task. Which is kind of a big deal when you think about what that means for anyone who wants to modify the robot.
We did a test at some point that I like to tell people about because it sounds a bit crazy. We completely disassembled Synthia — arms, legs, everything disconnected from the torso, just hanging off extension cables — and then we asked her to move. And she did. Everything worked correctly. Because she doesn't actually know or care about physical layout. She just sees what's on the bus. The bus had everything on it, so as far as she was concerned, nothing had changed. The physical disconnection was completely irrelevant.
What this means practically is that you can put pretty much anything into or onto this robot. Different arms, different sensors, wheels instead of legs, something we've never seen before — if it speaks the protocol, she'll detect it on boot, read the description, and start working with it. No need to call us, no firmware update required, no waiting.
And I genuinely think the most interesting things people will do with Synthia are things we haven't thought of yet.