what if

Sometimes I wonder, if claude could do something… And often it turns out that, yes it can. Maybe not perfect, but good enough.

just give it a try

So recently, I had claude design a simple LED panel and later a controller board.

By “design”, I mean: I described what I wanted the circuit to do, gave the physical dimensions of the pcb I wanted and claude went off to create kicad project, schematic and pcb files.

The simple LED panel used quite a bunch of tokens to get done, because claude was routing stuff and evaluating the results themself, but I have since learned, there’s KicadRoutingTools from this post This PCB is brought to you by Fable 5 (I used Opus 5 in this experiment) and the accompanying discussion on hackernews also contains some interesting hints. I’ll definitely be taking these into account the next time.

The success with the LED panel gave me confidence to have claude tackle a somewhat complex board: the controller board contains an ESP32, USB-C PD, 2 Buck Converters, some LEDs and Buttons, Headers and Claude wasn’t able to fully route that by itself, even after hours of trying and burning a bajillion tokens…

I ended up routing the controller board completely on my own and It turned into one of these tasks where I ended up looking at the clock at 01:00 after hours and hours of fiddling - one of the rare instances where I achieved a presumably 100% flow state - good times!

I had claude try KicadRoutingTools on a clean controller board with the components fixed in place and it did a decent job in way way waaaayyy less time and tokens!

lessons learned

• claude and other agent based ai tooling as of mid 2026 have become incredibly capable problemsolvers
• Definitely take KicadRoutingTools into account the next time
• Have claude create and maintain a makefile so its easy to rerun commands for you
• Let claude create a local html file with renderings of the pcb layers, 3d view etc. I also let it generate an stl that i can look at in an embedded 3d viewer.
• I did no research before starting this experiment and I should have, I would have arrived at the conclusion to use autorouter or similar tools instead of claude handrouting everything