Engineering

Agents that read KiCad: notes from our electronics work

What it takes for an agent to change a schematic, run ERC and DRC, and explain what it did.

October 1, 2026By Alexandre Collet

An agent that edits a schematic is only useful if an engineer can check its work as quickly as they would check a colleague's.

So every change it makes comes with the checks it ran, their results and the reasoning behind the change, filed next to the files themselves.

Here is what we learned getting there, from symbol libraries to the warnings worth excluding.

Before any code, one page that says what the agent does, what it must never do and how we will know it works.

Agents that work on native engineering files and checks, discipline by discipline, with engineers making every decision.

Interviews, shadowing and one spreadsheet: the method behind every engagement we start.

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