I've been playing in this space as a hobby for a while. I agree the current round of startups are dead ends but I doubt LLMs will be good enough without drastic

I've been playing in this space as a hobby for a while. I agree the current round of startups are dead ends but I doubt LLMs will be good enough without drastically different tooling than today (ECAD and ATE). I've been playing around on a DSL for schematic capture alongside the design contract and it works for most subcircuits quite naturally. From that you can deterministically create a set of simulations and hardware tests to validate everything.