alt Hacker NewsBuried at the bottom of the article, my favorite thing about modern Lego kits:
> One of the most intriguing features is unlocked when you press the ‘build together’ button on select sets in the app. This allows consumers to build a LEGO set as a team by delegating each builder a building task to complete.
My partner and I enjoy assembling Lego kits together, but with paper instructions parallelizing the work is pretty tricky (usually we end up alternating one person doing the actual assembly and the other picking out the correct parts for them). But with the LEGO Builder app, it dynamically generates two parallel sets of instructions. It works great even if you're working at different paces.
This is one of those software features that delights me both as a user and as an engineer. It probably was not that complex to implement (once they had the building steps in a machine-readable format), but it's a great use of its medium, something that you genuinely couldn't do without software.
Replies
On the contrary, this would ruin Legos for me and my girlfriend. We play it that one person is building, and the other person is taking the instructions and trying to speak them to the builder, who isn't allowed to look at the instructions. It's very fun and a great way for us to keep our communication going well in the relationship.
Had no idea this was a thing, sounds like it’d be fun with the kids. Who gets the next piece has been a problem as long as there’s been lego