[jononor]

I would not call validation of PCBs easy conceptually. We had to develop a lot of automation in validation to enable today production. Optical verification has been standard for many years, and X-ray is now getting commonplace also. Flying probes commonly used. Functional automated testing is standard for any non-hobby product. But you are right in that the automation overall was/is bottlenecks on the ability to do QA - which not only prevents defects from being sent out, but is also critical to systematic improvements in the production process (both tuning and new iteration). And I believe you are right to call out LLM based systems to be weak in this area, and it is a limiting factor. I believe that automated QA will be more and more critical to positive LLM impact.