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Adafruit probably did a review of AI PCB tools. I've used Flux.ai before; it was a pretty bad experience. After about 50-100$ in tokens a couple of times, I cou

Adafruit probably did a review of AI PCB tools. I've used Flux.ai before; it was a pretty bad experience. After about 50-100$ in tokens a couple of times, I couldn't get more than a couple of simple components on the schematic. And not in sensible positions. The product just grinds tokens for little return, in my opinion. I had far better luck wiring together KiCad MCP, SKIDL. There are some AI-driven autorouters out there now. Placement is probably the big issue that needs to be solved now. I could only get about 80% of what I wanted together with my hacky workflow.

embedding-shape 4mo ago
> After about 50-100$ in tokens a couple of times, I couldn't get more than a couple of simple components on the schematic. Is this common? When I try out new AI tools, even as person who is financially independent, I load up maybe 10-20 USD worth of tokens, and if I don't get anything working from that, I literally give up and don't continue trying. If it can't do anything useful like "place a simple component on the schematic" after ~10 USD of expenditure, is it really worth continue adding more money into the platform? Seems DOA in those cases.
- karmicthreat 4mo ago
  I used company money on it. I was hoping I could massage it along enough to get a workable test fixture out of it. I wanted to put together a simple hardware-in-the-loop tester for a component of our product.
- phs318u 4mo ago
  Someone should’ve told these guys: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48337328 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48337328
StephenSmith 4mo ago
I tried this last week and had the same experience. It was terrible and they got $140 out of me before I realized what it was (not) capable of. Their support was nonexistent as well.
- moron4hire 4mo ago
  All of these Gen AI tools where you pay a subscription fee are basically Software-as-a-Casino. You spin the wheel and hope it doesn't come up 00, then chase good money after bad when it does. Add in the parasocial relationship that some people develop with the LLM and you basically have OnlyFans but instead of vaguely dissatisfying feet pics to order it's vaguely dissatisfying code to order. It's that edge of "almost there, just one more token, bro" that makes it addictive.
  - Lerc 4mo ago
    That might be the right analogy except it is not clear that it is a house always wins situation. If you have a .6 chance of success on any particular outcome. Long term win or loss is down to your behaviour. If you double or nothing every time loss is guaranteed. The right strategy will win over the long term.
    - moron4hire 4mo ago
      Gambling addicts make all kinds of post-hoc rationalizations for why they are actually up, if you think about it. "Well, if you consider my entertainment, I'm actually up." "Well, if you think of all the drinks I got comped, I'm actually up." Even worse are the ones who talk about runs, "I was up $10,000 at one point." Nevermind they gave it all back and another $20k chasing that first $10k. At the end of the day, if they had just gone to the movies instead, they'd have more money on their pocket. Same with most people "doing a startup" or "opening a restaurant". There will be arguments all day long about how these affairs are technically possible and quite lucrative if everything goes according to plan. But the reality is that vanishly few people are equipped to identify and stick to the right plan. Reality meeting theory. I've told my developers they can use agentic coding if they want, but they must never mention it in the course of development. Not because I don't want to know, but because it's not going to change my evaluation of "their" work. If they can use the AI and get to a point that they can submit a PR that they themselves understand, then technically speaking, what do I care? But if it breaks the build or does something stupid and they don't understand it, it's going to be a bad day for them, whether they wrote it themselves or copied it out of StackOverflow or had Gemini do it. Nobody has taken me up on this offer, because I think they know that they aren't going to have the extreme discipline to do the hard thing of understanding "someone" else's code and sign their name to it.
mapontosevenths 4mo ago
> I could only get about 80% of what I wanted together with my hacky workflow. I literally did this yesterday with solid results using Codex CLI. I used xhigh thinking and gpt 5.5. I had it use KiCad directly via cli rather than via MCP, and I did make Claude Opus review it's work after every round. I got what I think will be a working revision A in about 10 hours of tinkering spread over a few days.
- nathanielks 4mo ago
  Is 10 hours a short amount of time for designing a PCB?
  - phlipski 4mo ago
    [dead]
  - markrages 4mo ago
    Faster than some, slower than some. PCBs come in all different levels of complexity.
  - tatjam 4mo ago
    I'd honestly love to see the PCB. Using an LLM for a mostly geometric task like PCB layout feels like using a hammer to cook a chicken, unless KiCAD has some kind of text-based description language i'm not aware of that gets around having to specify coordinates.
    - Teknoman117 4mo ago
      KiCad schematic and board files are all text based with a fairly strict grammar, so you would be able to feed it directly into an LLM. Not that that means the LLM could actually make sense of it. Never tried though XD
pjc50 4mo ago
> There are some AI-driven autorouters out there now. Placement is probably the big issue that needs to be solved now. Interesting that within an IC this is basically "solved", or at least properly automated with classical numeric techniques such as simulated annealing. I would have thought there's a big opportunity in a mixed-technique approach, where you use AI to extract unstructured data from datasheets and then feed it into more deterministic tools. I also note that it's very easy to waste more than $100 in electronics once you start actually manufacturing bad PCBs.
- doubled112 4mo ago
  > mixed-technique approach I think my biggest annoyance with the way we rolled out AI is that nobody seemed to want to use it to augment already working solutions. Just throw everything out and have an LLM do it instead.
  - NateEag 4mo ago
    I recently saw a Claude skill that used Claude, with no tools, as a spell checker. I wanted to hurl my laptop out to the window.
    - kangalioo 4mo ago
      What would be a better way to incorporate AI as a spell checker? In comparison to non-AI traditional tools, AI has the advantage of "understanding" the text, reducing the number of "stupid" mis-corrections. And its spelling correctness is usually already impeccable, so what is there to gain by interfacing it with traditional solutions, and how can it be achieved?
      - ceejayoz 4mo ago
        I am skeptical that AI brings any benefit to spell checking at all.
      - trollbridge 4mo ago
        AI can’t really spell check without risking changing the meaning of sentences. Spell checking was a solved problem before this.
ElFitz 4mo ago
> Placement is probably the big issue that needs to be solved now. Would some sort of constraint-solving algorithm help with that? Something like (but not necessarily) Cassowary[0]? Maybe I'm misunderstanding what is meant by placement though; I don't have much domain knowledge in PCBs / electronics. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43362528 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43362528
- lambdaone 4mo ago
  I've written my own autoplacer/autorouter. Placement is where you put the components on the board, routing is how you shape the traces to interconnect them. It does a pretty decent job on small hobby-project boards of ~40 components (which is my use case at the moment), and I'm working part-time in the background on scaling it further. The resulting designs pass all the KiCad electrical and geometry checks. Granted, I've spent about a year working on this problem, and it's hard, but not that hard a problem, providing you can avoid falling off the exponential cliff by decomposing it into hierarchical subproblems. Quick-and-dirty unsupervised whole-board synthesis from schematic takes about 5 minutes, longer if you want cleaner output with nicer-looking better-routed traces. As others here have said, placing is the real problem to solve, and that's where the magic happens. Place the components right, and routing is a relatively easy loosely-coupled constraint programming problem, place them wrongly, and you will have to get used to seeing the word UNFEASIBLE in your log output.
  - throwaway2037 4mo ago
    This project sounds very cool. Is it open source? If yes, can you share a link to the repo?
  - ElFitz 4mo ago
    That is fascinating. Thanks!
- seveibar 4mo ago
  We work on this a lot at tscircuit, and we've used cassowary (i.e. flexbox-style) constraint solvers. The issue with cassowary/flexbox is PCBs are not as uniform as webpages w.r.t. alignment, and often have a much less nested structure (3 layers) vs web pages which have many many nested layers. CSS grid-style constraints are a much better fit IMO, but we eventually settled on sequential optimal packing[1] for "seeding" a placement so that AI can get initial positions before working in a feedback loop. I like sequential optimal packing because it's very very deterministic and the constraints are specified pretty close to how a human would specify them [1] https://blog.autorouting.com/p/sequential-optimal-packing-for-pcb https://blog.autorouting.com/p/sequential-optimal-packing-fo...
inshane 4mo ago
This is exactly my experience, wasted $60 trying to get it to make something. The founder sent an automated AI email about setting up a time to meet and go through it then ghosted me at the meeting time.
- Barbing 4mo ago
  But at least their priorities are in order. How do you overcome those showstopping challenges & have more time to meet customers? Lawfare!
- bartvk 4mo ago
  Yes but look, they set up meetings so they're listening to customers, like all good founders /s
emsign 4mo ago
That's more money I have paid for (real) software (that are not games) in my entire life.
deweywsu 4mo ago
Same for my experience.
jojobas 4mo ago
Legal counsel typing intensifies.

embedding-shape 4mo ago

> After about 50-100$ in tokens a couple of times, I couldn't get more than a couple of simple components on the schematic. Is this common? When I try out new AI tools, even as person who is financially independent, I load up maybe 10-20 USD worth of tokens, and if I don't get anything working from that, I literally give up and don't continue trying. If it can't do anything useful like "place a simple component on the schematic" after ~10 USD of expenditure, is it really worth continue adding more money into the platform? Seems DOA in those cases.

karmicthreat 4mo ago
I used company money on it. I was hoping I could massage it along enough to get a workable test fixture out of it. I wanted to put together a simple hardware-in-the-loop tester for a component of our product.
phs318u 4mo ago
Someone should’ve told these guys: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48337328 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48337328

StephenSmith 4mo ago

I tried this last week and had the same experience. It was terrible and they got $140 out of me before I realized what it was (not) capable of. Their support was nonexistent as well.

moron4hire 4mo ago
All of these Gen AI tools where you pay a subscription fee are basically Software-as-a-Casino. You spin the wheel and hope it doesn't come up 00, then chase good money after bad when it does. Add in the parasocial relationship that some people develop with the LLM and you basically have OnlyFans but instead of vaguely dissatisfying feet pics to order it's vaguely dissatisfying code to order. It's that edge of "almost there, just one more token, bro" that makes it addictive.
- Lerc 4mo ago
  That might be the right analogy except it is not clear that it is a house always wins situation. If you have a .6 chance of success on any particular outcome. Long term win or loss is down to your behaviour. If you double or nothing every time loss is guaranteed. The right strategy will win over the long term.
  - moron4hire 4mo ago
    Gambling addicts make all kinds of post-hoc rationalizations for why they are actually up, if you think about it. "Well, if you consider my entertainment, I'm actually up." "Well, if you think of all the drinks I got comped, I'm actually up." Even worse are the ones who talk about runs, "I was up $10,000 at one point." Nevermind they gave it all back and another $20k chasing that first $10k. At the end of the day, if they had just gone to the movies instead, they'd have more money on their pocket. Same with most people "doing a startup" or "opening a restaurant". There will be arguments all day long about how these affairs are technically possible and quite lucrative if everything goes according to plan. But the reality is that vanishly few people are equipped to identify and stick to the right plan. Reality meeting theory. I've told my developers they can use agentic coding if they want, but they must never mention it in the course of development. Not because I don't want to know, but because it's not going to change my evaluation of "their" work. If they can use the AI and get to a point that they can submit a PR that they themselves understand, then technically speaking, what do I care? But if it breaks the build or does something stupid and they don't understand it, it's going to be a bad day for them, whether they wrote it themselves or copied it out of StackOverflow or had Gemini do it. Nobody has taken me up on this offer, because I think they know that they aren't going to have the extreme discipline to do the hard thing of understanding "someone" else's code and sign their name to it.

mapontosevenths 4mo ago

> I could only get about 80% of what I wanted together with my hacky workflow. I literally did this yesterday with solid results using Codex CLI. I used xhigh thinking and gpt 5.5. I had it use KiCad directly via cli rather than via MCP, and I did make Claude Opus review it's work after every round. I got what I think will be a working revision A in about 10 hours of tinkering spread over a few days.

nathanielks 4mo ago
Is 10 hours a short amount of time for designing a PCB?
- phlipski 4mo ago
  [dead]
- markrages 4mo ago
  Faster than some, slower than some. PCBs come in all different levels of complexity.
- tatjam 4mo ago
  I'd honestly love to see the PCB. Using an LLM for a mostly geometric task like PCB layout feels like using a hammer to cook a chicken, unless KiCAD has some kind of text-based description language i'm not aware of that gets around having to specify coordinates.
  - Teknoman117 4mo ago
    KiCad schematic and board files are all text based with a fairly strict grammar, so you would be able to feed it directly into an LLM. Not that that means the LLM could actually make sense of it. Never tried though XD

pjc50 4mo ago

> There are some AI-driven autorouters out there now. Placement is probably the big issue that needs to be solved now. Interesting that within an IC this is basically "solved", or at least properly automated with classical numeric techniques such as simulated annealing. I would have thought there's a big opportunity in a mixed-technique approach, where you use AI to extract unstructured data from datasheets and then feed it into more deterministic tools. I also note that it's very easy to waste more than $100 in electronics once you start actually manufacturing bad PCBs.

doubled112 4mo ago
> mixed-technique approach I think my biggest annoyance with the way we rolled out AI is that nobody seemed to want to use it to augment already working solutions. Just throw everything out and have an LLM do it instead.
- NateEag 4mo ago
  I recently saw a Claude skill that used Claude, with no tools, as a spell checker. I wanted to hurl my laptop out to the window.
  - kangalioo 4mo ago
    What would be a better way to incorporate AI as a spell checker? In comparison to non-AI traditional tools, AI has the advantage of "understanding" the text, reducing the number of "stupid" mis-corrections. And its spelling correctness is usually already impeccable, so what is there to gain by interfacing it with traditional solutions, and how can it be achieved?
    - ceejayoz 4mo ago
      I am skeptical that AI brings any benefit to spell checking at all.
    - trollbridge 4mo ago
      AI can’t really spell check without risking changing the meaning of sentences. Spell checking was a solved problem before this.

ElFitz 4mo ago

> Placement is probably the big issue that needs to be solved now. Would some sort of constraint-solving algorithm help with that? Something like (but not necessarily) Cassowary[0]? Maybe I'm misunderstanding what is meant by placement though; I don't have much domain knowledge in PCBs / electronics. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43362528 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43362528

lambdaone 4mo ago
I've written my own autoplacer/autorouter. Placement is where you put the components on the board, routing is how you shape the traces to interconnect them. It does a pretty decent job on small hobby-project boards of ~40 components (which is my use case at the moment), and I'm working part-time in the background on scaling it further. The resulting designs pass all the KiCad electrical and geometry checks. Granted, I've spent about a year working on this problem, and it's hard, but not that hard a problem, providing you can avoid falling off the exponential cliff by decomposing it into hierarchical subproblems. Quick-and-dirty unsupervised whole-board synthesis from schematic takes about 5 minutes, longer if you want cleaner output with nicer-looking better-routed traces. As others here have said, placing is the real problem to solve, and that's where the magic happens. Place the components right, and routing is a relatively easy loosely-coupled constraint programming problem, place them wrongly, and you will have to get used to seeing the word UNFEASIBLE in your log output.
- throwaway2037 4mo ago
  This project sounds very cool. Is it open source? If yes, can you share a link to the repo?
- ElFitz 4mo ago
  That is fascinating. Thanks!
seveibar 4mo ago
We work on this a lot at tscircuit, and we've used cassowary (i.e. flexbox-style) constraint solvers. The issue with cassowary/flexbox is PCBs are not as uniform as webpages w.r.t. alignment, and often have a much less nested structure (3 layers) vs web pages which have many many nested layers. CSS grid-style constraints are a much better fit IMO, but we eventually settled on sequential optimal packing[1] for "seeding" a placement so that AI can get initial positions before working in a feedback loop. I like sequential optimal packing because it's very very deterministic and the constraints are specified pretty close to how a human would specify them [1] https://blog.autorouting.com/p/sequential-optimal-packing-for-pcb https://blog.autorouting.com/p/sequential-optimal-packing-fo...

inshane 4mo ago

This is exactly my experience, wasted $60 trying to get it to make something. The founder sent an automated AI email about setting up a time to meet and go through it then ghosted me at the meeting time.

Barbing 4mo ago
But at least their priorities are in order. How do you overcome those showstopping challenges & have more time to meet customers? Lawfare!
bartvk 4mo ago
Yes but look, they set up meetings so they're listening to customers, like all good founders /s

emsign 4mo ago

That's more money I have paid for (real) software (that are not games) in my entire life.

deweywsu 4mo ago

Same for my experience.

jojobas 4mo ago

Legal counsel typing intensifies.