Trace: AI Native PCB Design

founder here - fair point on the schematic aesthetics, we're actively working on it.

we're also fully open source at github.com/buildwithtrace/trace so if you want to contribute or have opinions on how it should look, PRs are very welcome. also if you found it useful, an upvote would help when we do a proper HN launch!

This is cool and I had a little play around with it. The basic concept is integrating an AI agent interface inside KiCad.

I had some success with this prompt:

> Please design a simple, low cost amplifier circuit for the TEMD6200FX01 photodiode.

It's not news that LLMs can generate simple circuits, but what's useful about the integration is that the AI will iterate until KiCad's circuit 'linting' checks pass (which is a workflow that you can't trivially enable using a generic AI tool). On the other hand, the resulting schematic was so ugly I'd have rather just have made it myself.

See also the recently-posted open source project https://github.com/ForestHubAI/boardsmith

"Text prompt → KiCad schematic, BOM, and firmware. No templates — real wired circuits with computed values."