Vibe-Coding a PCB – surprisingly good
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Vibe-Coding a PCB – surprisingly good
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Re: Vibe-Coding a PCB – surprisingly good
#2Despite LLMs being decent at generating text (which has loose, messy rules), applications like PCB layout and coding with clearly-defined constraints make much more sense.
Having well-established, unambiguous rules that must be followed for functionality seems to be a key predictor of AI success. The more constrained and rule bound the domain, the better LLMs perform.
Re: Vibe-Coding a PCB – surprisingly good
#3[deleted]
Re: Vibe-Coding a PCB – surprisingly good
#4That's a very generic PCB, of which there are already hundreds on the internet, and in the datasheet of the manufacturer of the MCU ...
Re: Vibe-Coding a PCB – surprisingly good
#5Amazing. Inspires to try out Claude Code + skidl [1] to build a custom circuit for fun.
Re: Vibe-Coding a PCB – surprisingly good
#6While I think that AI tools can be quite useful for coding, PCB design, and other tasks like that, the setup of this experiment makes it really hard for the LLM to fail.
The author's prompt is basically already a meticulous specification of the PCB, even proactively telling the LLM to avoid certain pitfalls ("GPIO19 and GPIO20 on the ESP32-S3 module are USB D- and D+ respectively. Make sure these nets are labeled correctly so that differential routing works"). If you had no prior experience building that exact thing, writing that spec would be 95% of the work.
Anyway, I don't think the experiment is wrong, but it's also not exactly vibe-PCBing!
Re: Vibe-Coding a PCB – surprisingly good
#7The blog post isn’t clear: Did the LLM actually do the routing? The only screenshot showing connected traces comes after the author says they added ground fills and “tidied up the layout”
It’s amazing that this worked at all, but to be clear this layout is actually very bad. Just look at that minimum width trace used to carry power across the entire board and into the ESP32. Using min width traces and wrapping them and min clearance to components is a classic mistake of people (or LLMs?) that have zero understanding of PCB layout techniques beyond “draw lines until everything is connected”
It would be interesting to see if you could feed the file into an LLM and get it to produce the feedback.
Re: Vibe-Coding a PCB – surprisingly good
#8That's a very generic PCB, of which there are already hundreds on the internet, and in the datasheet of the manufacturer of the MCU ...
Sure, but that's most PCBs (or even subsets of PCBs). Most PCBs are not about using new/proprietary chips with custom requirements. It's mostly connect this MCU with some other ICs, some power delivery, some connectors, reverse voltage protection etc.
Re: Vibe-Coding a PCB – surprisingly good
#9While I think that AI tools can be quite useful for coding, PCB design, and other tasks like that, the setup of this experiment makes it really hard for the LLM to fail. The author's prompt is basically already a meticulous specification of the PCB, even proactively telling the LLM to avoid certain pitfalls ("GPIO19 and GPIO20 on the ESP32-S3 module are USB D- and D+ respectively. Make sure these nets are labeled cor…
> If you had no prior experience building that exact thing, writing that spec would be 95% of the work.
Nowadays most mainstream LLMs support pre-bundled prompts. GitHub Copilot even made it a major feature and tools like Visual Studio Code have integrated support for prompt files.
https://docs.github.com/en/github-models/use-github-models/s...
Also, LLMs can generate prompt files too. I recommend you set aside 10 minutes of your time to vibe-code a prompt file for PCB generation, and then try to recreate the same project as OP. You'd be surprised.
> Anyway, I don't think the experiment is wrong, but it's also not exactly vibe-PCBing!
I don't agree. Vibecoding doesn't exactly mean naive approaches to implementations. It just means you enter higher level inputs to generate whatever you're creating.
Re: Vibe-Coding a PCB – surprisingly good
#10The blog post isn’t clear: Did the LLM actually do the routing? The only screenshot showing connected traces comes after the author says they added ground fills and “tidied up the layout” It’s amazing that this worked at all, but to be clear this layout is actually very bad. Just look at that minimum width trace used to carry power across the entire board and into the ESP32. Using min width traces and wrapping them a…
> Did the LLM actually do the routing?
Good question. KiCAD once had a router, built in, or sort of built in, but it was taken out for licensing reasons. So who's doing that?