Introducing FixBot: We Built an AI That Actually Knows How to Fix Things

Moving my family across the country towing our trusty ‘92 ski boat, I hit a patch of ice in Kansas and slid our trailer into a snowbank. A wonderful local mechanic helped me melt the snow jammed into the wheel, reinflate my tires and sent us on our way. A hundred miles later, I pulled my exhausted family into a hotel parking lot outside St. Louis just as darkness fell. And then a wheel fell off.

It was well below zero and blowing hard. My family was exhausted. We were so close to the end of this trip, and I just wanted to be anywhere but Missouri.

I was not in a fix-it-myself mood. My tools were covered in ice. First thing in the morning, I pulled into the only mechanic open on a Sunday right when they opened. Sign on the door: closed due to staff shortage. I think my expression explains my mood.

I called AAA, and they sent a 19-year-old kid who had no clue how to do anything but swap tires. But my bearings had exploded. I didn’t know anyone in town. I needed help, and I couldn’t get it. I would have given anything for some guidance.

Why We Built FixBot

FixBot is our new AI repair helper. It is a calm, knowledgeable expert that helps you figure out what’s actually wrong and find the right documentation. Describe your problem by voice or text, and it does what a good expert does: asks the right questions, narrows down the possibilities, and guides you toward the fix.

In that Missouri parking lot, I needed someone to talk me through it. To ask: what does the hub look like? What’s the part number on the bearing race? Someone who could take my jumbled, panicked “the wheel fell off and I don’t know why” and work backward through the logic until we found the answer together.

That’s what FixBot does.

You tell it what’s happening: your phone dies at 30%, your washing machine won’t drain, your mower sputters and stalls. It asks follow-up questions. It eliminates possibilities. It thinks out loud with you, the way a master technician would, until the diagnosis clicks into place. Then it finds the parts and helps direct you to the appropriate repair guide.

We gave it a voice because your hands are busy. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been elbow-deep in a new PC build with thermal paste on my fingers, trying to Google “which RAM goes where” without smearing gray goop all over my phone screen. That’s why FixBot responds to voice. Just ask your question out loud and keep working.

And unlike the generic AI tools you’ve tried, FixBot actually knows what it’s talking about. It pulls its answers from our 125k repair guides, our massive question-answer forum, and our huge cache of PDF manuals. It knows how to find ideal bolt torque from a table in a manual. It can read a part schematic and tell you the part number you need to order. Importantly, it’s much better than other systems at not making stuff up. It’s not going to tell you to cut the blue wire when there is no blue wire.

The iFixit Library

A local auto parts shop gave me a bearing chart. I’d never read a bearing seal guide before. Do you see my axle bearing in this table? Neither did I.

FixBot can.

But I didn’t have FixBot that day. While I was outside freezing, my all-too-patient wife spent the day in the hotel room with our toddlers, who took their boredom out on our iPad, tossing it across the room and smashing the screen.

So I came back from my frozen ordeal to another repair waiting for me. But this one didn’t scare me because I had iFixit.

We’ve spent two decades building the world’s largest repair knowledge base. Not a collection of random forum posts and guesses, but a curated library of solutions that actually work. These solutions are written by technicians, tested by our community, refined through millions of successful repairs.

FixBot is built on top of all of it.

Let’s say you tell FixBot your iPad got toddlered: First, it identifies your exact model. On my old iPad 2, the glass and the display are separate pieces. Crack the glass but the picture’s still fine? You can replace just the digitizer for twenty-five bucks. But on newer iPads, the glass and LCD are fused into one assembly. You’re replacing the whole screen whether you like it or not. Get this wrong and you’ve ordered the wrong part and wasted time.

Then it searches our library for the specific solution, identifies the exact part you need (verified for compatibility), and directs you to the repair guide.

ChatGPT doesn’t know what’s inside your device. It gives you an answer that sounds right, but until you open your thing up you won’t know if the bot’s conflating your tablet with another. But we’ve actually opened thousands of these things and documented what we found. FixBot is built on that.

How FixBot Works

Here’s what’s happening under the hood: a handpicked combination of AI models for language, voice, and vision, plus a search engine we built from scratch to surface the right answer from our library. It selects the best model and data sources for each query.

1. Identify your device. FixBot identifies your specific model first. Take a picture of the model number or browse our database to find your device.
2. Diagnose carefully. I run into this constantly: I open something unfamiliar and have no idea what I’m seeing. Is that the exhaust manifold or the air intake? Which cable goes where? Because you can upload images, FixBot can talk you through what’s right in front of you and what might be wrong. I tested this on my gas furnace, an appliance I’d never touched, and it recognized the inlet temperature sensor instantly, then looked up the error code in the manual. FixBot reasons through problems the way an experienced fixer does: eliminating variables, zeroing in on what you’re actually dealing with.
3. Hit the library. Every answer starts with a search for guides, parts, and repairs that worked.
4. Repair with confidence. Use our step-by-step guides to work through the repair, asking FixBot when you have questions.

We spent over a year building a custom retrieval system that searches our entire library in seconds. And an evaluation harness that tests FixBot against thousands of real repair questions, so we catch the bad answers before you do.

We created a database with millions of pages of documentation; the data sheets and service manuals and specification tables that the rest of us only look at when we’re desperate. FixBot will find the right PDF manuals, look deep inside, and surface the answer on page 576. It’ll even cross-reference part numbers against your specific model.

This is infrastructure you don’t see, but you feel, in the difference between an answer that wastes your afternoon and one that gets you unstuck.

What FixBot Can’t Do (Yet)

FixBot is an AI, and AI sometimes gets things wrong. We’ve worked hard to keep it grounded in facts; every answer pulls from repair guides, teardowns, and real service manuals rather than internet hearsay. But it’s not perfect, and we’d rather you know that upfront than find out mid-repair.

We also don’t have a guide for everything. If you’re fixing a 2003 Kenmore dryer or an obscure espresso machine, we might not have your exact model. FixBot will do its best with manufacturer docs, targeted web searches and information from similar models, but it won’t be the same as a tested, community-verified guide for your exact problem. That’s a problem you can help solve. Every guide on iFixit was written by someone who figured out a repair and shared it. Fix something we haven’t documented? Write it up. Have a PDF on your hard drive of a service manual that’s missing? Upload it to the device’s page on iFixit. Your repair becomes the next person’s answer.

Fix the Planet

We’re on a mission to fight climate change by making all the things around us last longer. The energy use and carbon impact of AI data centers used by FixBot is not lost on us. We haven’t fully reckoned with that as a society, but it’s clear that AI is here to stay.

FixBot helps people avoid the needless early replacement of products that are very material and energy intensive to produce. That doesn’t negate our energy impact: this is a fine line that we need to walk. One way to reduce the impact of data centers is by doing a better job with repair and reuse of data center equipment. IBM and Cisco are fighting our Right to Repair law that obligates them to do this in Colorado, but we’re going to keep pushing back.

How Much Is It?

We’re launching FixBot free for everyone for a limited period. We’re planning to have both a free version with access limits and a paid tier that includes voice and document upload.

The Fix (And What I Learned)

Back in Missouri, I was alone in a frozen parking lot watching YouTube videos on my phone with numb fingers. In and out of hardware and auto parts stores. I kept buying parts, driving across town to the trailer, and finding that they didn’t fit. Six trips. I was near tears. Not because the repair was impossible, but because I was stuck, and cold, and alone, and I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

I finally figured it out: a non-standard bearing size I’d never even heard of. Turns out these axles have two different size wheel bearings. I learned something new about how trailer axles work, just about gave the AutoZone guy a hug, and felt that familiar rush you only get from fixing something yourself.

Next time, I’ll have FixBot. I’ll have someone to bounce ideas off and talk me through the problem. It’s almost uncanny how good it is: I took a photo of my refrigerator model plate and it instantly helped me track down the problem with my grinding icemaker.

The Expert Helper You’ve Always Wanted

You’ve been there too. Maybe not a wheel in a frozen parking lot, but that moment mid-repair where you’ve got the guide open and something about your situation doesn’t match. You hit an unexpected fork, and you just want to ask someone: is this normal? What should I check next? Am I about to make this worse?

And here’s what matters more than the technical magic: FixBot doesn’t make you feel stupid for not knowing.

It doesn’t judge. It doesn’t rush. When you’re mid-repair and something doesn’t look right, you can say “wait, this doesn’t match the picture” and it’ll adapt. When you’re anxious about making things worse, it walks you through the risks before you commit. It’s patient in the way a good mentor is patient—because the goal isn’t to show off what it knows, it’s to get you to the other side of the repair.

While I hope you’re never in a jam like I was, FixBot will be there to help if you are. Whether it’s wheel bearings or a phone battery or a chainsaw that won’t start, you don’t have to figure it out alone anymore.

Your stuff belongs to you. You should be able to fix it. And now you can.