I designed my LED matrix PCB with code

I know routing is one of those really hard problems, and for a long time they were all pretty bad at even moderately complex or constrained designs. Have things gotten better recently with the rise of machine learning? (Specifically not 'AI')

There's a half dozen of them in any category, they are all different, they all seem to struggle badly with anything outside of simple examples, none of them appear to consider how things fit together in the real world, you almost never see any of them used for anything more complicated than a keyboard layout or an LED matrix, they all have reinvented the wheel instead of using industry standard formats, and they all talk about the "difficulty of using traditional tools" as though placing each XY point in space in your head is easier than dragging things around the screen like in MS Paint. You also never see any serious hardware people use them. Every one wants to do it all from keyboard to finished product instead of being satisfied as a intermediate tool that does one thing well.

But, they all have very polished documentation, they come with examples, they have nice looking websites, and it's obvious someone put a decent amount of thought into making them. It's not like they are useless either. Making a big grid of things? It's nice to be able to write an algorithm to do that instead of entering them by hand.

I brought this up in that post about the LLM to CAD thing the other day. It's like people keep saying "hardware is hard" but then keep trying to solve it like they would work on software problems.

I hear Altium has some pretty decent autorouting. The problem here is that by the time you've set up all the grouping, constraints and settings to get an auto route that works well, you probably could have just routed the board yourself. So I've never used it once. There's still no magic button you can click once to make a full routed board. As far as I know, autorouting for all the big players is still based on tried and true algorithms like A-star. They might be getting a little better year over year, but not so much so that anyone noticed.

I have seen quite a few improvements in manual routing though. It seems like the manual routing tool has gotten better at pushing traces out of the way, and if you move a routed component you might not need to redraw all the traces going to it anymore.