[peteforde]

Hey man, speak for yourself.

It's never occurred to me to even try getting an LLM to design or layout a circuit for me.

Instead, I have dozens or hundreds of chats in my history where I debate the merits of different parts for different tasks and scenarios, the nuances of decoupling strategies (package size vs deregulation), work out resistor network ratios from the reels I have on hand.

Then being able to feed an LLM a datasheet and have it write a custom driver against the registers I need so that it does exactly what I want without the cognitive overhead of a buggy package with someone else's strong opinions about how a part should be used is amazing.

Frontier models are incredibly good at electronics, and it's got nothing to do with what happens inside the EDA.

[nubinetwork]

Design, no... but I've definitely thought about letting one route traces... while autorouters work, I was hoping Claude could do matched traces better. At the time, it didn't want to generate the kicad pcbnew file though. /shrug

[peteforde]

Everyone is different, but board layout is one area where I aggressively don't want any LLM input until such a time as it is as good at board layout as it is at refactoring code.

We're still a ways off from that, and that's likely because board layout requires a much more nuanced perspective of the enclosure shape, power requirements, heat dissipation, RF...

It's really not about placing ICs with caps nearby. I actually really enjoy that part anyhow. That's the fun part!