I used company money on it. I was hoping I could massage it along enough to get a workable test fixture out of it. I wanted to put together a simple hardware-in-the-loop tester for a component of our product.
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 now. Placement is probably the big issue that needs to be solved now. I could only get about 80% of what I wanted together with my hacky workflow.
I'm tired. I've been at it since '89' when I was 15. Everything being on fire all the time (in the world and in my current robot project) is just burning me out.
Most of my curiosity is tempered by how it can make me money.
I do appreciate that 50-70% of the boring work can be done with AI agents now. As long as you know enough to have opinions and guide the process along, it can be helpful.
Expertise and learning don't seem to be AS important with the upcoming gen of developers. However, there is also so much out there now that it would be much harder to start from zero as opposed to being there from the beginning.
But I think gen X and Millenials were probably peak interest and curiosity, now it's just a job for the later generations.
This product doesn't really have much oomph without integrating with other appliances. If this was combined with other equipment like a water heater and heat recovery it would be a much better value.
I disagree here. Maybe if someone has had very little exposure to programming. I've found with an admittedly limited and completely anecdotal survey of developers around me that stress helps. The deadlines and people actually depending on you is a crucible that helps you get better much faster. You have to develop all the soft and hard skills that go with just pounding keys. Like project management and time estimation. Dealing with other people and evaluating problems.
You might get there with total freedom, but stress might get you there faster.