The history of antimicrobial drug discovery is rooted in antibiotic-producing soil microbes. During the mid 20th century “golden age” in antibiotic discovery, numerous antibiotic drug classes were discovered. However, antibiotic discovery has stalled in recent decades, resulting in few to no new antibiotics reaching the market. In the meantime, widespread antibiotic resistance is making many currently used drugs clinically obsolete. Renewed investment in natural product-based drug discovery has become increasingly feasible due to advances in mass spectrometry and whole-genome sequencing, allowing for the identification of previously overlooked hard to identify novel metabolites of interest. These advancements have led labs to reestablish pipelines for discovering, isolating, characterizing, and testing new antimicrobial agents. With this renewed interest, natural product discovery still comes with the pressing issue of avoiding rediscovering already known antibiotics. Importantly, it is not only necessary to avoid rediscovery of molecules, but also avoid identifying compounds with already well-characterized antimicrobial mechanisms of action that offer no clinical novelty. Our overall goal is to improve the existing discovery pipeline that uses soil samples as input and aims to identify microbes that secrete antibacterial compounds. We culture soil isolates in a high-throughput agar array next to reporter bacteria. The growth inhibition or survival of these reporters indicates whether a soil isolate produces an antibiotic active against Gram-negative bacteria, Gram-positive bacteria, or produces a compound for which clinical resistance is already prevalent and therefore represents a useless rediscovery.