> The one thing I will say, is that my experience of hardware engineers is very gatekeepy.

Stay away from Reddit and forums if you want to see where the open minded people are looking. There are a lot of communities where EEs are experimenting with newer technologies and sharing their results, with realistic appraisals of what can be done.

You also need to understand the history of autorouting technology for PCBs. Autorouters with auto layout have been around in many forms for years. Their output never compares to a skilled EE doing it manually. The gap between autorouter output and skilled operator output is even bigger than the gap between a good developer and average AI codegen slop.

I’m interested in this space, but even the Fable/Astra or dedicated tools like Quilter, Flux, and others have a very, very long way to go for boards more complex than simple hobby boards.

I do think this is going to be good for hobby people doing simple PCBs though

My experience with hardware engineers, at least IRL, is very different. They love to talk about their work. However, I used to be an EE so that probably helps.

As for Reddit, there's a lot of "bury head in sand and problem will go away" behavior when it comes to AI. People are understandably worried about their jobs, but they're certainly not doing themselves any favors by downplaying AI or looking for "tech niches where AI isn't yet."

Copperhead is very interesting. I do some embedded systems consulting on the side, but I've never enjoyed PCB layout very much. I briefly investigated using AI for it the last time I had to do a board, but it wasn't very helpful.

we're developing https://copperbench.org - an open-source benchmark for evaluating ai agents on real, verifiable hardware design tasks.

Copperhead directly edits the KiCad files so that is the CLI version of that Astra demo.

This is what I want to know as well. I'm about to kick off a project or two.

It seems like this is just controlling KiCad. Assuming this produces a BOM as well, you could take the output files, send them to a board house like PCBWay or JLPCB and get the boards stuffed and shipped to you.

The board houses may have questions for you that may be difficult for you to answer, but theoretically you could answer those with AI and get fully assembled boards delivered right to your doorstep.

Pretty much with the JLC plugin to KiCad.

soon :)

Design for Manufacturability (DFM) will determine if they generate a viable product. Hardware is difficult, with a success rate around 1:66 for a startup.

It is a good idea to consult with a contract manufacturer engineering team early, and stop wasting peoples time including their own.

I have also seen people re-brand China pad-printed generic products, and claim they needed investor help buying a shipping container full of cheap stuff or outright e-waste. Careful, especially if you see multiple versions or the same product pop up at the same time. Best of luck =3

I’ve read it the same way. Definitely a double edged slogan.

haha nice catch but this is about development speed

LM555 or 300MB nodejs App on a $300 SoC... the choice is clear... lol =3

the website isn't the product. try copperhead and judge the engineering :)

when LLM calls are the bottleneck, the programming language stops mattering.

copperhead isn't just a wrapper around claude or gpt. it combines model intelligence with its own hardware IR, deterministic engines and continuous verification.

Some PM realized that agents will not push back against waterfall style project planning, so now we get an agent for all possible versions of waterfall projects.

I use a jigsaw to cut wood. It works pretty good. What’s the point of a table saw?