// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
Can AI design circuit boards yet?
OpenAI showed GPT-6 Astra working in KiCad. We have been building a way to measure
whether the circuits that come out of these models are any good.
We got pretty excited yesterday when OpenAI put a demo of GPT-6 Astra working on a circuit board in KiCad on the front page of its
launch post. It is cool to see electronics show up in a major model release like this.
We are obviously still some distance from asking an AI to build an entire phone in one prompt. The demo does
raise a question we have been thinking about for a while, though: how do we measure whether the electronics an
AI produces are actually any good?
Our experience has been that current models know much more about electronics than their output in
conventional design tools tends to show. They have read textbooks, datasheets, application notes and a lot of
code.
You can have an agent operate a graphical CAD tool, but it spends a lot of time clicking around and keeping
track of what is on screen. A lot of its context consists of coordinates, menus and application state.
EEBench uses atopile instead. The circuit
lives in declarative code, so the agent can work directly on components, connections and electrical
constraints. It can change the design, build it, run a simulation and inspect what failed without leaving the
project.
This has worked much better for us than asking a model to draw lines in a GUI. It also means the benchmark
can spend less time testing computer use and more time testing electronics.
One of the public tasks is based on a residential energy meter. When its 5 V supply disappears, the circuit
has to keep the processor alive for another 20 ms so it can save the accumulated reading. The protected rail
must stay above the processor's 3.0 V brownout threshold during that window.
Most models intuitively jump to the right base conclusion: add a capacitor.
A real capacitor makes the task more interesting. A ceramic part may provide much less than its advertised
capacitance once it has voltage across it. Parts have tolerances. Adding more capacitance costs more, takes up
space and makes the rail slower to recharge when the power returns. A design that works with nominal values
can fail with the parts that arrive.