"Anyone else out there vibe circuit-building?"

im imagining if you had a couple parts picked, an llm could follow the reference designs quite well and pick relevant parts and lay them out.

maybe not in the best way, but from a post here last week or so, somebody has written an altium mcp, from which i assume a bunch of the timing and capacitor checks could be run.

maybe not anything particularly high tech, but enough to let mechanical engineers put together test boards without needing to get too far into the electrical discipline

If I understand what you are doing this sounds like a great idea.

For example a part like the ADS7953 ADC comes with layout recommendations, including the design of the ground plane underneath the chip and the placement of the decoupling caps. A more extreme example would be an esp32 and all of it's supporting parts, including the keepout area on the PCB for wifi transmission.

I really want to assemble circuits out of higher level primitives like that, drag and drop a chip and all of its supporting parts, including their layout and power connections.

I've been vibe circuit building since the 1970s, but that's not what this is about, is it? ;-)

Years ago, at Pumping Station One in Chicago, I watched someone struggle with the driving of multiple LEDs from an Arduino in his project. He wondered why the LEDs got dimmer when more than one was lit.

I looked at the original schematic, and what he had built, and noticed a difference. The original design had a resistor on each LED, but he had decided that was a redundancy and refactored it to use a single LED instead. In the case of current flow, this meant the circuit still worked, but that current limiting that resistor provided now was shared across every active LED, leading to the progressive dimming as more LEDs were active.

It turned out his background was in software, where the assumptions are much different as to what is important. Cutting out redundant code is an important skill.

I saw it as a cognitive impedance mismatch being played out in real life.

I assume the same is true for an LLM/AI attempting the same leap.

I actually had this exact scenario come up last week except that in my version it warned me to make sure that I added a resistor to each LED to keep brightness normalized.

I didn't happen to need this particular advice, but it stuck in my head as something that would potentially save someone learning a lot of pain.

I ve modified my ZigBee bathroom led light. Replaced the daughterboard with an esp32, integrated a humidity sensor and a presence sensor, another rely and a power circuit, and I now have a bathroom light that lights up automatically when someone is in the room, and turns on the extractor only if the humidity is a ove a certain level.

I ve done all this by taking photos of the circuits and asking Gemini how to do it.