Some anecdata: This weekend as a lark I asked Claude Code to design a (fairly simple) analog circuit and simulate it in LTSpice to verify. It did three edit-simulate-fix cycles and to my surprise ended up with something that seemed pretty sane.

That said, schematics (as opposed to netlists) don't seem to be a practical I/O format yet. It did generate a KiCad schematic file when asked, but it was pretty bad (penguin on a bicycle level).

Anyway, somehow there does seem to be some electronic tools training happening, becuase I tried this maybe a year ago and it was pretty hopeless.

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wafflesfreak 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

This is exactly why the first version of our tool worked with netlists only. We've since evolved to parsing the full KiCad project and generating a netlist from it so we can also extract schematic-specific metadata that doesn't make it into the netlist (designer notes/annotations, component positions, etc.)

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wrs 3 days ago | parent [-]

This looks great, but I want to know when LLMs will be useful for generating schematics rather than just checking them! It’s such a letdown right now to jump from doing firmware with Claude Code to drawing schematics manually like it’s 2022. :) When does KiCad get its little assistant pane on the right?

	▲	klysm 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Schematic generation doesn’t really make sense to me because the cost of a problem going unnoticed is much more significant in hardware design than software.

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asauter 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

cool, how did you connect claude to ltspice?

	▲	wrs 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I just told Claude Code to use the command line LTSpice tool. Actually, I'm not even sure I did that much, I may have just told it to "use LTSpice"!