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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

#261

Post by joshfee »

For those interested in leveraging AI to build circuit boards, check out https://tscircuit.com/

I have no affiliation to the project, just someone that's done some hobby PCB design in the past and a couple weeks ago was exploring what's available in age of AI. Flux looked expensive and unimpressive. While it definitely burned through some tokens, I was able to get a seemingly functional PCB meeting my design requirements and was able to iterate on it using my existing Claude code subscription. I did use Gemini for some of the initial design research and parts selection since I find its search a bit better, but was overall impressed. I think with some tuning of the Claude skills to have it do a bit less guess-and-check it could be a nice workflow. Definitely better than the either really dated or really expensive PCB design tools in the market.

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

#262

Post by ahaucnx »

ladyada wrote: post #161

hi everyone, its me 'ladyada. we're very much looking forward to telling our story, i have reached out to the founder of flux.ai (Matthias Wagner - Founder & CEO at Flux), in hopes we can resolve this together and set a good example for the community. looking forward to maybe seeing this resolved on a podcast together, or something

Unrelated to this (and sorry for highjacking this topic), but just want to say a big big thank you to ladyada for founding Adafruit.

When we decided to go fully open source hardware at AirGradient, I looked at the ‘business’ models of two companies: Adafruit and Arduino.

Seeing that both worked sustainably, made our decision much easier and it was probably one of the best decisions of our life. I just talked at the Open Hardware summit in Berlin about “50 devices later: The open source hardware advantage” [1].

[1] https://2026.oshwa.org/talks/100-achim-haug/

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

#263

Post by selcuka »

neutronicus wrote: post #85
doubled112 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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'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…

My pet peeve: Whenever I type

    MyModel.obj
and wait when working on a Django project, Copilot completes it with

    MyModel.objects.all().delete()

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

#264

Post by 4Humboldt »

otterley wrote: post #243
ladyada wrote: post #161

hi everyone, its me 'ladyada. we're very much looking forward to telling our story, i have reached out to the founder of flux.ai (Matthias Wagner - Founder & CEO at Flux), in hopes we can resolve this together and set a good example for the community. looking forward to maybe seeing this resolved on a podcast together, or something

Can we see the demand letter, please? If not, why not? My concern here is that this is like a child going to their parents to complain their sibling hit them, only to find out when you ask the sibling that the first one pushed them off their bicycle. If you don't share it, I think it's a reasonable assumption that you're coming in with unclean hands, trying to use the court of opinion to gain sympathy while denying u…

While usually legal to do so, it is typically also equally unwise to do so. That may displease you and others, but I don’t think that aspect is a highly relevant factor here.

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

#265

Post by altaccount2026 »

cj wrote: post #224
altaccount2026 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

This comment was dead. I vouched for it to un-dead it... As an outsider with zero context, I'm having a hard time understanding what's going on with this whole thing. The tone of the conversation is giving me flashbacks to the Matt Mullenweg debacle.

[flagged]

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

#266

Post by sroussey »

AviationAtom wrote: post #247
otterley wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we see the demand letter, please? If not, why not? My concern here is that this is like a child going to their parents to complain their sibling hit them, only to find out when you ask the sibling that the first one pushed them off their bicycle. If you don't share it, I think it's a reasonable assumption that you're coming in with unclean hands, trying to use the court of opinion to gain sympathy while denying u…

Their legal council may have advised them not to publish it at this moment

Yes, almost certainly. My council has told me the same before, but I published anyhow to no ill effect other than opposing council shocked I did so. Too bad for them.

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

#267

Post by pocksuppet »

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…

And it works. It fucking works. It's the same reason every game has lootboxes.

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

#269

Post by marcus_holmes »

sleepybrett wrote: post #240
evntdrvn wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if it helps, I've found that using context (Claude.md etc) is way less effective for this type of pattern compared to using PreToolHook to capture "bad patterns" and either transparently rewriting them to "do the right thing" if that is possible statically, or if not then rejecting the tool use with a message that tells the agent "how" to use the intended tooling itself.

and/or write a skill

Writing skills is the new writing code

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

#270

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

lambda wrote: post #197
mattkrause wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this pretty much why language models were invented? Pasting something directly into the chat interface seems weird, but if you could somehow just see where P(token | context) falls off a cliff, that's a pretty good hint that your writing has problem.

Yeah, but for this use case you don't need Claude. You probably want a tuned lightweight small model that can run locally. Even Haiku is massive overkill for this use case.

I've done it to check transcriptions of handwritten 19th century Quebec French. Is there a dedicated spell checker for that?
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