[cushychicken]

Thanks for the reply. I’ll get in touch via email in the next few days.

I don’t think the goals of “human in the loop” and “fast and decent” are mutually exclusive, or really even at odds with each other.

I just think that most autorouters I’ve tried seem to have been written by CS people who thought PCB layout was an interesting problem to solve - without a particularly deep understanding of what working EEs care about in terms of how you route the board.

Case in point: plenty of autorouters seem to work on the paradigm of “all tracks routed? Great. I’m done.” Never mind that everything is two layers of spaghetti: no ground plane, no power planes, no regard for SI or EMC compliance. In other words: pure hell to test and certify.

Not trying to be crotchety EE by saying this - I can give a good example of what I mean in real time. I also feel like I’m a bit of the exception in the EE community in that I think this is a solvable problem. I just don’t think many CS people have really bothered to consult any real working EEs about their workflows and the downstream portion of test and certification.