Adafruit receives demand letter from Fenwick legal counsel on behalf of Flux.ai • Hacker News Board

Re: Adafruit receives demand letter from Fenwick legal counsel on behalf of Flux.ai

#51

Post by cryo32 » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 12:23 PM UTC

inshane wrote: post #19

As an electrical engineer who has tried to use it multiple times, I think Flux is an absolutely awful product. No surprise at all that they want to sweep details about their “intellectual property, commercial traction and user base” under the rug.

Yeah this stuff isn't even realistic as well.

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.

Re: Adafruit receives demand letter from Fenwick legal counsel on behalf of Flux.ai

#52

Post by ptorrone » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 12:23 PM UTC

altaccount2026 wrote: post #46

zettabomb wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious, but I'm not sure if you can say - has Adafruit ever published anything about Flux?

[flagged]

new "altaccount2026" only posting twice, today, about this. we are very much looking forward to sharing our story, very very soon.

if you "altaccount2026 " really want a twitter archive of my photos of my kids, puppets, links to my articles, posts, and more, it may be available on some archiver.

we are very much looking forward to sharing our story.

press@adafruit.com for inquires ...

Re: Adafruit receives demand letter from Fenwick legal counsel on behalf of Flux.ai

#53

Post by doubled112 » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 12:29 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #47

karmicthreat wrote: post #18

Adafruit probably did a review of AI PCB tools. I've used Flux.ai before; it was a pretty bad experience. After about 50-100$ in tokens a couple of times, I couldn't get more than a couple of simple components on the schematic. And not in sensible positions. 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 are some AI-driven autorouters out there now. Placement is probably the big issue that needs to be solved now. 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…

> mixed-technique approach

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.

Re: Adafruit receives demand letter from Fenwick legal counsel on behalf of Flux.ai

#54

Post by malfist » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 12:40 PM UTC

ceejayoz wrote: post #48

ptorrone wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

new empty "altaccount2026" with only this post, hi. please email press@adafruit.com , limor and i are looking forward to telling our story very soon - pt & limor

They have a few more if you turn showdead on. All about y’all.

Almost makes you wonder if they're the sparkfun ceo and perpetuating that asinine feud.

Re: Adafruit receives demand letter from Fenwick legal counsel on behalf of Flux.ai

#55

Post by moron4hire » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 12:41 PM UTC

StephenSmith wrote: post #22

karmicthreat wrote: post #18

Adafruit probably did a review of AI PCB tools. I've used Flux.ai before; it was a pretty bad experience. After about 50-100$ in tokens a couple of times, I couldn't get more than a couple of simple components on the schematic. And not in sensible positions. 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…

I tried this last week and had the same experience. It was terrible and they got $140 out of me before I realized what it was (not) capable of. Their support was nonexistent as well.

All of these Gen AI tools where you pay a subscription fee are basically Software-as-a-Casino. You spin the wheel and hope it doesn't come up 00, then chase good money after bad when it does. Add in the parasocial relationship that some people develop with the LLM and you basically have OnlyFans but instead of vaguely dissatisfying feet pics to order it's vaguely dissatisfying code to order. It's that edge of "almost there, just one more token, bro" that makes it addictive.

Re: Adafruit receives demand letter from Fenwick legal counsel on behalf of Flux.ai

#56

Post by subscribed » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 12:48 PM UTC

zettabomb wrote: post #45

jdnrebd wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should read the linked article

I have, and the article does not in any way address my question. You also seem to be a brand new user, so in case you're not aware, HN guidelines say to refrain from mentioning whether or not someone has read the link.

As a long time reader I keep wondering how it is more conductive to the discourse to comment without reading than to point that the answers might be in the article someone ignored.

Re: Adafruit receives demand letter from Fenwick legal counsel on behalf of Flux.ai

#57

Post by lambdaone » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 12:49 PM UTC

ElFitz wrote: post #49

karmicthreat wrote: post #18

Adafruit probably did a review of AI PCB tools. I've used Flux.ai before; it was a pretty bad experience. After about 50-100$ in tokens a couple of times, I couldn't get more than a couple of simple components on the schematic. And not in sensible positions. 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…

> Placement is probably the big issue that needs to be solved now. 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. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43362528

I've written my own autoplacer/autorouter. Placement is where you put the components on the board, routing is how you shape the traces to interconnect them.

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.

Re: Adafruit receives demand letter from Fenwick legal counsel on behalf of Flux.ai

#58

Post by ahartmetz » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 12:52 PM UTC

doubled112 wrote: post #53

pjc50 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are some AI-driven autorouters out there now. Placement is probably the big issue that needs to be solved now. 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…

> mixed-technique approach 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.

Something something bitter lesson blah blah

I think the bitter lesson is severely misapplied in the current situation: If progress from "just add more resources" is very slow, and a huge amount of money is at stake, continous work on hand-engineering can give a continuous and very valuable competitive advantage.

The labs all seem to be going for AGI through bigger LLMs, and I am reasonably sure that it's not going to happen like that.

Re: Adafruit receives demand letter from Fenwick legal counsel on behalf of Flux.ai

#59

Post by Lerc » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 12:57 PM UTC

moron4hire wrote: post #55

StephenSmith wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried this last week and had the same experience. It was terrible and they got $140 out of me before I realized what it was (not) capable of. Their support was nonexistent as well.

All of these Gen AI tools where you pay a subscription fee are basically Software-as-a-Casino. You spin the wheel and hope it doesn't come up 00, then chase good money after bad when it does. Add in the parasocial relationship that some people develop with the LLM and you basically have OnlyFans but instead of vaguely dissatisfying feet pics to order it's vaguely dissatisfying code to order. It's that edge of "almost…

That might be the right analogy except it is not clear that it is a house always wins situation.

If you have a .6 chance of success on any particular outcome. Long term win or loss is down to your behaviour. If you double or nothing every time loss is guaranteed. The right strategy will win over the long term.

Re: Adafruit receives demand letter from Fenwick legal counsel on behalf of Flux.ai

#60

Post by NateEag » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 1:02 PM UTC

doubled112 wrote: post #53

pjc50 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are some AI-driven autorouters out there now. Placement is probably the big issue that needs to be solved now. 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…

> mixed-technique approach 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.

I recently saw a Claude skill that used Claude, with no tools, as a spell checker.

I wanted to hurl my laptop out to the window.