[akiselev]

> Most common question on HN seems to be "what are people building". Well, stuff like this.

Hear, hear! I’ve got my altium-cli repo open source in Github as well, which is a vibe coded CLI for editing vibe reverse engineered Altium PCB projects. It’s not yet ready for primetime (I’m finishing up the file format reverse engineering this weekend) and the code quality is probably something twelve year old me would have been embarrassed by, but I can already use it and Claude/Gemini to automate a lot of the tedious parts of PCB design like part selection and footprints. I’m almost to the point where Claude Code can use it for the entire EE workflow from part selection to firmware, minus the PCB routing which I still do by hand.

I just ain’t wasting time blogging about it so unless someone stumbles onto it randomly by lurking on HN, they won’t know that Claude Code can now work on PCBs.

[rubenflamshep]

How much of an ECE background do you have? I've also thought about dabbling in LLM-assisted PCB stuff but felt like I was lacking too much of a foundation to get started (no ECE background at all)

[akiselev]

I'm self taught but used to work as an EE professionally doing high speed digital and RF mixed signal work.

It honestly might have been easier without that experience because KiCad is open source and their S-expr file format is easy to use. I'm stuck with Altium since that's what I learned on and am used to.