While I think that AI tools can be quite useful for coding, PCB design, and other tasks like that, the setup of this experiment makes it really hard for the LLM to fail.
The author's prompt is basically already a meticulous specification of the PCB, even proactively telling the LLM to avoid certain pitfalls ("GPIO19 and GPIO20 on the ESP32-S3 module are USB D- and D+ respectively. Make sure these nets are labeled correctly so that differential routing works"). If you had no prior experience building that exact thing, writing that spec would be 95% of the work.
Anyway, I don't think the experiment is wrong, but it's also not exactly vibe-PCBing!
> If you had no prior experience building that exact thing, writing that spec would be 95% of the work.
Nowadays most mainstream LLMs support pre-bundled prompts. GitHub Copilot even made it a major feature and tools like Visual Studio Code have integrated support for prompt files.
Also, LLMs can generate prompt files too. I recommend you set aside 10 minutes of your time to vibe-code a prompt file for PCB generation, and then try to recreate the same project as OP. You'd be surprised.
> Anyway, I don't think the experiment is wrong, but it's also not exactly vibe-PCBing!
I don't agree. Vibecoding doesn't exactly mean naive approaches to implementations. It just means you enter higher level inputs to generate whatever you're creating.
Sure, but the utility of that for PCB design wasn't demonstrated in the article. This is an expert going out of his way to give the LLM a task it can't fumble (and still does, a bit).
> Sure, but the utility of that for PCB design wasn't demonstrated in the article.
Forget about the article. Try it yourself. Set aside 5 or 10 minutes to ask any LLM of your choice to generate a LLM prompt to generate PCBs. Iterate over your prompt before using it to generate your PCB. See the result for yourself.
The author's prompt is basically already a meticulous specification of the PCB, even proactively telling the LLM to avoid certain pitfalls ("GPIO19 and GPIO20 on the ESP32-S3 module are USB D- and D+ respectively. Make sure these nets are labeled correctly so that differential routing works"). If you had no prior experience building that exact thing, writing that spec would be 95% of the work.
Anyway, I don't think the experiment is wrong, but it's also not exactly vibe-PCBing!