A number of years ago I was working on something professionally and there was a problem. Only about 1 in 5 boards assembled wouldn't crash the CPU. After much debugging it turned out one of the ICs had an open collector output and it wasn't loaded correctly with a pull up resistor. This caused a cascading failure, held the bus up when initialising the hardware which hit the WDT and reset the CPU over and over again.
If you aren't there designing the thing in the first place, you never read the datasheets, never drew the schematic, never placed the components and thus don't know where to look when something goes wrong. And it does go wrong. And then you're in deep shit.
I worry about people who think they can get a product out of the door with this stuff but can't.
The product just grinds tokens for little return, in my opinion. I had far better luck wiring together KiCad MCP, SKIDL. There are some AI-driven autorouters out there now. Placement is probably the big issue that needs to be solved now. I could only get about 80% of what I wanted together with my hacky workflow.
Interesting that within an IC this is basically "solved", or at least properly automated with classical numeric techniques such as simulated annealing.
I would have thought there's a big opportunity in a mixed-technique approach, where you use AI to extract unstructured data from datasheets and then feed it into more deterministic tools.
I also note that it's very easy to waste more than $100 in electronics once you start actually manufacturing bad PCBs.
I think my biggest annoyance with the way we rolled out AI is that nobody seemed to want to use it to augment already working solutions.
Just throw everything out and have an LLM do it instead.
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.
Is this common? When I try out new AI tools, even as person who is financially independent, I load up maybe 10-20 USD worth of tokens, and if I don't get anything working from that, I literally give up and don't continue trying. If it can't do anything useful like "place a simple component on the schematic" after ~10 USD of expenditure, is it really worth continue adding more money into the platform? Seems DOA in those cases.
Would some sort of constraint-solving algorithm help with that? Something like (but not necessarily) Cassowary[0]? Maybe I'm misunderstanding what is meant by placement though; I don't have much domain knowledge in PCBs / electronics.
I can't find in archive.org if they had a previous post about it.
Also, seems like there a good bunch of complains in Reddit about Flux and its billing...
https://old.reddit.com/r/PCB/comments/1t476x4/warning_fluxai...
limor and i are very much looking forward to telling our story.
That if people were to email press@adafruit.com with a subject line (for example) of 'FLUX - AMA for later', these questions could be rounded up and the responses could then go onto a Adafruit blog page later, when and if applicable?
Is Philip still at Adafruit? Does he represent Adafruit?
Why did you take the Adafruit blog down when there appeared to be no Flux.ai-related posts?
Open companies like SparkFun publish the legal letters they receive, will you do the same? If not, why not?
Why did @ptorrone recently delete all his x.com post history?
Based on recent events with SparkFun[1] and Phil Torrone deleting all his social media posts[2][3], not publishing the C&D it is likely that Flux' beef is with Phil and not Adafruit.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46616488
if you "altaccount2026 " really want a twitter archive of my photos of my kids, puppets, links to my articles, posts, and more, it may be available on some archiver.
we are very much looking forward to sharing our story.
press@adafruit.com for inquires ...
Thank you, lawyers. If you ever find yourself out of work use this as your reference to pivot to advertisement
Seems especially useful when paired with an agentic coding tool!
Not only did it burn a 100$ failing but it did so in a very untransparent way.
I bought a 20 dollar plan but they snuck a 100$ billed usage into the billing agreements next thing I know the agent as used the quote going in circles and my card is billed.
When you discover an exploit, only communicate with source (and pray they respond) or get sued. Seems like the position is customers and stakeholders shouldn't be allowed access to this information.
Not sure what the issue between them and Adafruit is. However, people over on Reddit¹ claim that Flux.ai is a little bit scummy. They push users into a beginner trial ($5/month) and then silently charge for usage per token - up to $100 per month.
Oh, they also claim that they have "the world's largest community-driven public library of Adafruit products, including footprints, symbols, datasheets, and simulation models"². I wonder whether they designed these themselves or whether they use existing ones. Could not easily find licenses info.
¹) https://www.reddit.com/r/PCB/comments/18o5zfo/thoughts_on_fl...
A confession