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Comment by tuetuopay

2 days ago

I was puzzled a bit, then realized they only handle schematics. Saying "PCB schematics" is weird.

A schematic is just a representation of a netlist, something where text is more than fine since the graphical form is only for human consumption. An LLM is actually a pretty good fit to cross-reference datasheets and netlists.

Would it be actual PCB layout I would be skeptical as LLMs are quite poor at anything spatial. For schematics however, it could work quite well as a double check.

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tuetuopay

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klysm  2 days ago

I don’t buy that it would be very good at reliably finding problems in schematics either. There’s no big dataset on the internet to train on

  • wrs  2 days ago

    Some anecdata: This weekend as a lark I asked Claude Code to design a (fairly simple) analog circuit and simulate it in LTSpice to verify. It did three edit-simulate-fix cycles and to my surprise ended up with something that seemed pretty sane.

    That said, schematics (as opposed to netlists) don't seem to be a practical I/O format yet. It did generate a KiCad schematic file when asked, but it was pretty bad (penguin on a bicycle level).

    Anyway, somehow there does seem to be some electronic tools training happening, becuase I tried this maybe a year ago and it was pretty hopeless.

    • wafflesfreak  2 days ago

      This is exactly why the first version of our tool worked with netlists only. We've since evolved to parsing the full KiCad project and generating a netlist from it so we can also extract schematic-specific metadata that doesn't make it into the netlist (designer notes/annotations, component positions, etc.)

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