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.
Edit: it’s almost assumed at this point but for completeness Claude / Codex were the ones driving the OO python code and datasheet research and parsing.
Then we got LLMs which will make a good parody of anything and occasionally get it right.
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.
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.
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.
It does a pretty decent job on small hobby-project boards of ~40 components (which is my use case at the moment), and I'm working part-time in the background on scaling it further.
The resulting designs pass all the KiCad electrical and geometry checks. Granted, I've spent about a year working on this problem, and it's hard, but not that hard a problem, providing you can avoid falling off the exponential cliff by decomposing it into hierarchical subproblems.
Quick-and-dirty unsupervised whole-board synthesis from schematic takes about 5 minutes, longer if you want cleaner output with nicer-looking better-routed traces.
As others here have said, placing is the real problem to solve, and that's where the magic happens. Place the components right, and routing is a relatively easy loosely-coupled constraint programming problem, place them wrongly, and you will have to get used to seeing the word UNFEASIBLE in your log output.
[1] https://blog.autorouting.com/p/sequential-optimal-packing-fo...
Hope common sense prevails and Adafruit can go back to doing what it does best instead of dealing with this (IMO) distraction.
Adafruit works tirelessly to build trust with the community. So, if they’re fighting something I just assume they’re doing it for our benefit.
Before issuing any public response, and before involving the press - Limor wrote directly to Flux’s founder, Matthias Wagner. Not through lawyers. Founder to founder.
She proposed: a podcast of his choosing, open questions and answers, with the community watching and taking part. She offered to keep Phil off the podcast.
Her words:
“Before we both spend lots of time and money embroiled in a legal dispute, I would like to explore with you a way to reconcile things and perhaps turn this into a positive… adults with good intentions can work together and solve them… Cooler heads can prevail and we could set a good example for the community, building a future together where everyone can make and share electronics.”
She followed up the next day, again.
That offer stands. We would still rather build than litigate, and we would still rather talk in the open. We think that is how this should work - between two companies who both believe anyone with a browser should be able to make electronics, we can set a good example together.
We will update the community, and will still look forward to sharing our story.
- ladyada & pt
When we decided to go fully open source hardware at AirGradient, I looked at the ‘business’ models of two companies: Adafruit and Arduino.
Seeing that both worked sustainably, made our decision much easier and it was probably one of the best decisions of our life. I just talked at the Open Hardware summit in Berlin about “50 devices later: The open source hardware advantage” [1].
If not, why not?
My concern here is that this is like a child going to their parents to complain their sibling hit them, only to find out when you ask the sibling that the first one pushed them off their bicycle.
If you don't share it, I think it's a reasonable assumption that you're coming in with unclean hands, trying to use the court of opinion to gain sympathy while denying us the full picture.
Unilaterally publishing Flux's demand letter probably isn't prohibited but doing so prior to discussion or any notice IS a signal. And it's a signal that could be interpreted by Flux as non-constructive, escalation or possibly even combative. In the absence of clear communication, things can be interpreted incorrectly.
I've been in far too many of these potentially contentious, early-lawyer-letter loops over the decades. It's actually shocking how easily things can spiral into unintended escalation over essentially nothing, especially very early on. And the more things start amping up, even if only in one party's imagination, it's absurd how hard to can be to climb back down. Especially with lawyers in the loop who are incentivized to fully preserve all their client's rights, posture aggressively for tactical position and burn retainer 12 minutes at a time.
I finally started to "get it" after maybe the third time in three years where I discovered after several months, $15,000 and a bunch of stress that the whole stupid thing could have been sorted in the first week by acting slowly, dismissing my assumptions and resisting all my instincts about how to respond. Let's just give these folks a week to see if there's a way to hit CTRL+Z, before we start demanding details just so we can pass meaningless mob judgement on who's right or wrong.
Does anyone have some more context about what happened here? An uncharitable analogy might be that I misconfigured my front door by not locking it, which doesn't give someone the right to walk in and look around - but I have no idea what Adafruit is specifically being accused of doing.
(I agree that Adafruit's statement itself is worded pretty terribly!)
This is all 100% speculation, just based on checking the archive sites and search sites historical data and finding nothing.
And yep, I'm not a lawyer - and even if I were, I couldn't begin to speculate about this post because it says so little.
Nor is this Flux the display warmth app
(AFAICT they haven't published anything yet? If they have it's been taken down).
There's a definite bit of Streisand effect here because I for one am very much looking forward to finding out what the deal is.
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?
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.
Embedded might be resistant to it, because software-hardware interactions are notoriously hard to sim, and AI still struggles with meatspace operations.
Not that it would stop anyone!
You say "people who think they can get a product out of the door with this stuff but can't" and I immediately think: Arduino. That was also seen as a way to introduce people who understand nothing about embedded to embedded. Surely no one would ever go from an Arduino prototype to an actual production run?
Ha ha WRONG. I've seen actual production hardware ship with Arduino firmware, because no one cared enough to fully rewrite that cobbled together Arduino firmware from the first prototype. The FW team just went over it enough to whack-a-mole the most obvious issues, and shipped the result.
So, no. People are absolutely going to ship AI genned embedded hardware, and get away with it too. I bet that by now, someone already did.
If you can’t or don’t entirely go over the output, the failure mode is invisible.
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.
I don't want to pay for a service that doesn't deliver.
A handful of honest participants like DeepSeek are pay as you go instead of trying to sneakily bill you for usage.
Thank you, lawyers. If you ever find yourself out of work use this as your reference to pivot to advertisement
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.
https://www.cpomagazine.com/cyber-security/microsoft-doubles...
If you're not, then you don't have to.
A confession
To some of us, this is elementary navigation. Like going up the stairs if the elevator is out. Often it's faster than waiting for the damn elevator, too.
To others, it's cybarrrr-criiiimeeee!!!!!!11111one
Mind you there can be nuances, but that quote is like saying "I took their stuff, but it was poking out of their pocket."
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...
Their PCB designs are mostly CC Attribution-ShareAlike typically.
What's funny is that most Adafruit products aren't exactly secret. Most of them have open source schematics and PCB layouts. Even when they aren't, they pretty much just a reference design from a data sheet. The kind of people that have the competence to be using board design software could replicate their designs pretty easily.
Single comment.
Completely ignores the rest of the ongoing salient discussion about how, yeah, Flux-AI isn't really working for a lot of people here.
Astroturf probability > three nines.
It must be a difficult realization, when you're selling vaporware, that your intended market (a) has hard metrics, and (b) has the wherewithal to quickly determine whether those metrics are being met.
tl;dr -- customers, especially technical customers, even if those technical customers are early adopters and generally positive on the idea of the special sauce you claim to be adding, are much more critical than investors. At least until the investors understand what the customers are saying.
I have no affiliation to the project, just someone that's done some hobby PCB design in the past and a couple weeks ago was exploring what's available in age of AI. Flux looked expensive and unimpressive. While it definitely burned through some tokens, I was able to get a seemingly functional PCB meeting my design requirements and was able to iterate on it using my existing Claude code subscription. I did use Gemini for some of the initial design research and parts selection since I find its search a bit better, but was overall impressed. I think with some tuning of the Claude skills to have it do a bit less guess-and-check it could be a nice workflow. Definitely better than the either really dated or really expensive PCB design tools in the market.
"solution" is an interesting choice. I haven't talked to anyone who tried it and actually got anything useful. It completely failed when I tried using it.
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...
The EDA space doesn't strike me as being anywhere near as SWE when it comes to AI.
Honestly, I haven’t seen an autorouter that doesn’t take at least as much time as it takes to do it by hand to sort out the results. But then I’m also not paying thousands for premium tools, so???
I find that with some experience, routing and placement is kinda the fun part..
Did they access it knowing that there was a server misconfiguration or was this only learned of after the fact? Because Computer Fraud and Abuse is pretty serious.
1. Make a slop machine that's a wrapper around another slop machine like claude, openai, google or whatever.
2. Hire a lawyer to send threatening emails to anyone that might call you out.
3. Get a few investors that are completely clueless to throw a ton of cash at you for having ai in your product.
4. Profit.
Honestly, get a hold of Louis Rossmann, this shit needs to stop.
