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

blog.adafruit.com

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

#211

Post by Teknoman117 »

tatjam wrote: post #179
nathanielks wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is 10 hours a short amount of time for designing a PCB?

I'd honestly love to see the PCB. Using an LLM for a mostly geometric task like PCB layout feels like using a hammer to cook a chicken, unless KiCAD has some kind of text-based description language i'm not aware of that gets around having to specify coordinates.

KiCad schematic and board files are all text based with a fairly strict grammar, so you would be able to feed it directly into an LLM. Not that that means the LLM could actually make sense of it. Never tried though XD

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

#213

Post by ncr100 »

mbonnet wrote: post #193

now I have a moral reason (in addition to clear engineering reasons) to never use Flux!

IMO it is the management that made the decision - the people in charge are the interesting "never partner with" people, again IMO.

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

#214

Post by dmitrygr »

Despite the lack of context (as is expected when gangsters like Fenwick and West get involved -- i've gotten letters from them), I will throw my lot in with Adafruit. The people who run Adafruit have been nothing but upstanding and reasonable the entire time that business has existed. I'm willing to bet that they are in the right knowing only that -- it is enough.

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

#215

Post by Lerc »

moron4hire wrote: post #205
Lerc wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's still gambling, you've just made yourself the house. Developers have to gamble on whether they will be better with AI or without. The no excuses criteria means if they choose AI and it performs well, you both win, if it performs poorly they lose. If they don't choose AI but colleagues do and it performs well, they lose relative to their colleagues. The sensible solution would be solidarity and all reject the o…

I very much doubt they are thinking that deep. I think you're bending over backwards to give the AI an out based off of an incomplete picture. You can't have a complete picture because you haven't been here in this project. Back two years ago, a lot of them were playing with AI code gen. They also have some explicit tasking for using agentic AI tooling to evaluate for use in an analytics product we're building, so it…

>I very much doubt they are thinking that deep. I think you're bending over backwards to give the AI an out based off of an incomplete picture. You can't have a complete picture because you haven't been here in this project.

This is a principle that could apply to any property that may be beneficial but also might be detrimental. That is why the gambling analogy applies.

This is about who carrys the risk for choices, regardless of if it is about using AI or something else.

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

#216

Post by jlarocco »

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.

Annoying, but not surprising.

The future is using AI to do everything, and nobody gets funded saying they're taking a small step forward.

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

#217

Post by spamizbad »

I'm not sure if this was Flux, but one of those AI EDA tool companies had a somewhat absurd ad where the narrator stated the AI tool told them a capacitor was being used to block DC, and that's something they never learned while getting an EE degree. Now, I don't have an EE degree, but I feel like how capacitors interact with AC and DC are sort of "passive components 101" that even hobbyists learn quite early on.

The EDA space doesn't strike me as being anywhere near as SWE when it comes to AI.

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

#218

Post by amirhirsch »

mindslight wrote: post #185
cryo32 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I'm with you on the complexity of debugging hardware, as I've been there too. But I will say, automatically adding pullups to floating pins is something that an automated process could succeed at. Not first gen of blindly throwing an LLM at circuits and hoping, but perhaps a later improvement that uses metadata about parts. Perhaps curated metadata about parts, or always starting with a reference design and tweaking…

I am working on hardware debugging now. There are no good dataset for EE root-cause-analysis. Would be interested in hearing more from your experience: my first name at my HN handle .com

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

#219

Post by wincy »

hamburglar wrote: post #95
neutronicus wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been frustrated with Copilot in this regard. I work on a large C++ codebase, with large files. Human developers jump around between files with the Visual Studio fuzzy search, set breakpoints to trace execution in the Debugger, use the IDE's refactoring tools. Microsoft's answer to this was to just ... expose none of this to their Agent Mode!? Replace the working semantic autocomplete with fucking lies!? Maybe it…

I work in Unity and I got frustrated with Claude constantly doing gross bash/grep/awk/sed/grep nested loops that took forever that I finally described (and had Claude implement and install) a tool that could, in a single pass, gather all this info from a Unity forest of scenes at once and answer all the questions Claude ever wanted to ask about a Unity project in a single pass that takes 50ms instead of 10 30 second…

Haha yep I’m experimenting with Unreal engine and Codex and it spent 10 minutes while I was AFK confidently trying to build a scene. I load it up and fall through the world. I say “can’t you write a tool to screenshot so you know you’ve done a reasonable job correctly?” and now it does that.

It reminds me of working with a junior dev and he was pushing his code to dev, then waiting for it to build for every update because he couldn’t get it to build locally. 5 minutes of my time fixing his config surely saved him hours over the project. He wasn’t a bad dev either!

You have to do a lot of the meta thinking for the agents, because they’ll take an “everything looks like a nail if you have a hammer” with their toolkit.

Writing an entire local generated asset pipeline using flux and hunyuan3D-2.1 was a really fun experience. I’ve done software for years but never game dev and it’s just so much fun even if it’s junky little games to impress my kids and get them involved in the creative process.

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

#220

Post by jlarocco »

kangalioo wrote: post #63
NateEag wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What would be a better way to incorporate AI as a spell checker? In comparison to non-AI traditional tools, AI has the advantage of "understanding" the text, reducing the number of "stupid" mis-corrections. And its spelling correctness is usually already impeccable, so what is there to gain by interfacing it with traditional solutions, and how can it be achieved?

>What would be a better way to incorporate AI as a spell checker?

You just don't need AI to do spell checking. It's a waste of energy, bandwidth and tokens. It's like Java Enterprise Fizz-Buzz - 1000x more complicated than it needs to be and complete overkill.

But at least you can tell your manager you're using AI!

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