Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mapontosevenths 9 days 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.

1 comments

Is 10 hours a short amount of time for designing a PCB?
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.
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
Faster than some, slower than some.

PCBs come in all different levels of complexity.