PCB is brought to you by Fable 5

As someone who does both hardware design (mostly high precision analog electronics) and software engineering, the difference between both fields in AI capability is striking. Models like Fable and Astra can provide lots of interesting insights into the design of specialty electronics when prompted correctly. Yet they can hardly put that knowledge to work if instructed to generate a schematic or lay out a PCB.

Of course, for readers here with a solid grasp on how LLM's operate it's not exactly surprising. Still, I feel this is exactly the kind of thing that drives home that the way we reason about (general) intelligence does not map cleanly to LLM operation, no matter how advanced the current models are.

I built a project nearly identical to this one so knowing the level of complexity required, I'm not surprised it worked. AI is indeed raising the floor. Even simple hobby designs were once out of reach, but now we can "YOLO it and build stuff fast without necessarily knowing about the details" as the author puts it.

That said, without experience it's easy to pierce the veil of "simple circuitry" by accident, just like in XKCD: Tasks[1].

Looking at preview of the author's next project at the end of the article, I'm not so sure the same strategy will work. The board is probably two orders of magnitude more complex. Without knowing the circuit details, I see many red flags (randomly placed ics and decoupling, likely wrong length matching, random thick traces indicating lack of foresight on power distribution, backwards connectors, the probably unnecessary use of BGA footprints, etc).

[1]: https://xkcd.com/1425/

Very cool! Can you reveal how much this custom board cost you?