I built a bot that designs circuit boards. Then I asked it to design the circuit board that would hold the bot itself — a little recursive dream, a robot sketching its own skeleton. It almost worked. That “almost” is the whole story of AI in PCB design in 2026, and I want to tell it from the workbench.
What Actually Worked
I run a small lab where I build automation tools, and I’ve been testing the current generation of AI-assisted EDA platforms the way I’d test any tool: give it a real job, watch where it fails, note where it surprises me. The honest finding is that AI is genuinely good at narrow, well-bounded tasks. Give a modern platform a prompt describing a sensor node and it will draft a schematic from your words, pull in real parts from a component library, and even attempt routing on a board you’ve already placed.
That last part matters. Routing is the grunt work no human enjoys, and having a modall team — and it’s heading somewhere real. I just wouldn’t ship it unattended.
🕒 Published: