Adafruit probably did a review of AI PCB tools. I've used Flux.ai before; it was a pretty bad experience. After about 50-100$ in tokens a couple of times, I couldn't get more than a couple of simple components on the schematic. And not in sensible positions.
The product just grinds tokens for little return, in my opinion. I had far better luck wiring together KiCad MCP, SKIDL. There are some AI-driven autorouters out there now. Placement is probably the big issue that needs to be solved now. I could only get about 80% of what I wanted together with my hacky workflow.
As an electrical engineer who has tried to use it multiple times, I think Flux is an absolutely awful product. No surprise at all that they want to sweep details about their “intellectual property, commercial traction and user base” under the rug.
Yeah this stuff isn't even realistic as well.
A number of years ago I was working on something professionally and there was a problem. Only about 1 in 5 boards assembled wouldn't crash the CPU. After much debugging it turned out one of the ICs had an open collector output and it wasn't loaded correctly with a pull up resistor. This caused a cascading failure, held the bus up when initialising the hardware which hit the WDT and reset the CPU over and over again.
If you aren't there designing the thing in the first place, you never read the datasheets, never drew the schematic, never placed the components and thus don't know where to look when something goes wrong. And it does go wrong. And then you're in deep shit.
I worry about people who think they can get a product out of the door with this stuff but can't.
In the pure software domain, this is solved by letting the AI own the entire loop. The AI writes the code, runs the code, tests the code, troubleshoots the code and fixes the code.
Embedded might be resistant to it, because software-hardware interactions are notoriously hard to sim, and AI still struggles with meatspace operations.
Not that it would stop anyone!
You say "people who think they can get a product out of the door with this stuff but can't" and I immediately think: Arduino. That was also seen as a way to introduce people who understand nothing about embedded to embedded. Surely no one would ever go from an Arduino prototype to an actual production run?
Ha ha WRONG. I've seen actual production hardware ship with Arduino firmware, because no one cared enough to fully rewrite that cobbled together Arduino firmware from the first prototype. The FW team just went over it enough to whack-a-mole the most obvious issues, and shipped the result.
So, no. People are absolutely going to ship AI genned embedded hardware. I bet that by now, someone already did.
Everything you said is exactly the proper argument against vibe coding.
If you can’t or don’t entirely go over the output, the failure mode is invisible.
Vibe coding is certainly the main part of it. But another problem is how deep our software and hardware stacks are. There is too much information to retain to solve problems now.
Flux just got funding from Bain and others, and it feels like Adafruit was preparing a post about it. Maybe they contacted Flux to confirm some info and they freaked out?
I can't find in archive.org if they had a previous post about it.
Also, seems like there a good bunch of complains in Reddit about Flux and its billing...
https://old.reddit.com/r/PCB/comments/1t476x4/warning_fluxai...
Note that this is not related to Black Forest Labs Flux, the image synthesis models builders, and is instead related to a PCB AI authoring product called Flux.ai.
Also not related to https://fluxkeyboard.com/
Nor f.lux, the warm light software that got Sherlocked by every major OS.
Nor the continuous delivery K8s tool. https://fluxcd.io/
Man that’s a blast from the past; used to be one of my fav apps.
Nor the Flux Capacitor from Back to the Future.
Nor the Cartoon Network show (and later movie) Aeon Flux.
There's a lesson in here about how to name your product, but I can't quite flux my finger on it
> Time to shine
Nor is this Flux the display warmth app
Thanks, that name was indeed making me wonder what's going on with the BFL people. :)
Exactly, these vectors point in very different directions!
Had no idea about this. Now I do.
Thank you, lawyers. If you ever find yourself out of work use this as your reference to pivot to advertisement
Streisand in full effect!
It's super effective!
hi everyone, its me 'ladyada. we're very much looking forward to telling our story, i have reached out to the founder of flux.ai (Matthias Wagner - Founder & CEO at Flux), in hopes we can resolve this together and set a good example for the community. looking forward to maybe seeing this resolved on a podcast together, or something
I love the transparency that Adafruit is proving on this.
hi everyone, phil and limor here, any questions for now, email press@adafruit.com
limor and i are very much looking forward to telling our story.
It might be being suggested in that statement, but to me that reads that there's a potential opportunity there for a delayed AMA on this?
That if people were to email press@adafruit.com with a subject line (for example) of 'FLUX - AMA for later', these questions could be rounded up and the responses could then go onto a Adafruit blog page later, when and if applicable?
limor and phil here, we would 100% welcome it, looking forward to telling our story very soon - pt & limor
Can we see the content of the demand letter? It should have been linked to your post. It's difficult for us to evaluate the merits of their allegations otherwise.
I'm curious, but I'm not sure if you can say - has Adafruit ever published anything about Flux?
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new "altaccount2026" only posting twice, today, about this. we are very much looking forward to sharing our story, very very soon.
if you "altaccount2026 " really want a twitter archive of my photos of my kids, puppets, links to my articles, posts, and more, it may be available on some archiver.
we are very much looking forward to sharing our story.
press@adafruit.com for inquires ...
Adafruit sure has a lot of stories they are eager to tell lately.
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You should read the linked article
I have, and the article does not in any way address my question. You also seem to be a brand new user, so in case you're not aware, HN guidelines say to refrain from mentioning whether or not someone has read the link.
Just reply with a quote from the article. They will understand they did not read carefully, and you can avoid the low-value 'read the article' snark (that might be false since often it is not actually in the article when somebody does that).
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new empty "altaccount2026" with only this post, hi.
please email press@adafruit.com , limor and i are looking forward to telling our story very soon - pt & limor
They have a few more if you turn showdead on. All about y’all.
Almost makes you wonder if they're the sparkfun ceo and perpetuating that asinine feud.
Looks like Flux.ai got some publicity out of this. Maybe not the kind they wanted - after reading this thread, I'll sure never give them a dime.
Yea I had no idea this product exists but it seems to be pretty horrible from the experiences shared in this thread
Struck a nerve, but I wouldn’t back down. If they do take you to court, there’s this wonderful thing called discovery.
I wanted to love flux.ai because i love codex... and if i could automate the creation of some PCB projects with as much success as I am with codex it would have been quiet fun in the shop... so i gave them a $100~ bucks and i got like nothing in return so I decided i'd wait and see... sounds like it has not improved.
From what I can tell, the message is
When you discover an exploit, only communicate with source (and pray they respond) or get sued. Seems like the position is customers and stakeholders shouldn't be allowed access to this information.
Seems similar to what Microsoft is doing lately:
https://www.cpomagazine.com/cyber-security/microsoft-doubles...
That's actually very common even with respected bug bounty programs. Communicating exploits to anyone else (let alone the general public) will at the very least make you ineligible for rewards.
What's the context here?
It seems there's suspiciously little context available, yet here I also am commenting on a 'vaguepost'. I wonder if one day AI will be able to filter out vagueposts from my browser along with ragebait and curiosity gap headlines.
Idk now that there are bunch of comments on the thread it’s vastly more interesting.
If AI does that it’ll make us 10x readers
Indeed, however:
10 x 0.1 = 1Bold of you to assume my reading ability is that high.
It's deliberately written that way, by lawyers who are making sure they (Adafruit) won't accidentaly admit to something they didn't.
Best I can tell they've taken down whatever it was, but most likely flux left some ways to get data out of their system that shouldn't have been and Adafruit leveraged that. Could have been in a good way like exposing false claims of architecture or security, or a bad way like revealing proprietary information on how the platform worked or looking at other peoples' projects (more than just seeing they could do that). If the blog doesn't come back up, I'll kinda assume they did something bad. I don't have sources but I've heard adafruit isn't the sweetest fruit in the tree...
> Adafruit accessed only information that Flux’s own systems made publicly available through a server misconfiguration
Does anyone have some more context about what happened here? An uncharitable analogy might be that I misconfigured my front door by not locking it, which doesn't give someone the right to walk in and look around - but I have no idea what Adafruit is specifically being accused of doing.
what about if I knock on the door (send an http request), and someone comes to it and hands me a bunch of documents (sends an http response with data).
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That isn’t legal in most jurisdictions either. You’re not a lawyer.
What isn’t legal? Cant really square your comment with GP comment.
It often does when your front door is otherwise a business storefront. Without knowing the specifics of what was accessed, analogies really aren't helpful. And there seems to be zero context here, so this strikes me as the most plausible scenario: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48368635
(I agree that Adafruit's statement itself is worded pretty terribly!)
Never heard of Flux.ai before. It seems to be a 3D circuit designer with 'AI'.
Not sure what the issue between them and Adafruit is. However, people over on Reddit¹ claim that Flux.ai is a little bit scummy. They push users into a beginner trial ($5/month) and then silently charge for usage per token - up to $100 per month.
Oh, they also claim that they have "the world's largest community-driven public library of Adafruit products, including footprints, symbols, datasheets, and simulation models"². I wonder whether they designed these themselves or whether they use existing ones. Could not easily find licenses info.
¹) https://www.reddit.com/r/PCB/comments/18o5zfo/thoughts_on_fl...
> Adafruit’s reporting concerns a matter of public security interest and was conducted in the ordinary course of responsible disclosure
I was surprised they didn't publish the text of the demand letter verbatim.
I previously had a passing interest in Flux, now I'm certain it's a fraud.
Had anyone tried AutoPCB (https://autopcb.app/) instead?
Seems especially useful when paired with an agentic coding tool!
Yep, and it’s terrible
Not only did it burn a 100$ failing but it did so in a very untransparent way.
I bought a 20 dollar plan but they snuck a 100$ billed usage into the billing agreements next thing I know the agent as used the quote going in circles and my card is billed.
We need outcome based billing...
I don't want to pay for a service that doesn't deliver.
> We need outcome based billing... I don't want to pay for a service that doesn't deliver.
You can already do this: hire a consultancy to build you a working deliverable for a fixed price. They will be incentivized to prompt their tools well and to avoid tools that are consistently pathological.
They will also charge a lot more than you using the service if they aren’t charlatans
Edit: actually they probably will charge even more if they are charlatans
I’m so sick of this that I go to the trouble to set up prepaid cards to pay for these things now.
A handful of honest participants like DeepSeek are pay as you go instead of trying to sneakily bill you for usage.
Flux.ai offers a PCB design solution which is a clear interest for Adafruit. Anyone have any idea what this is about?
For anyone that has been missing the memo on how to become rich:
1. Make a slop machine that's a wrapper around another slop machine like claude, openai, google or whatever.
2. Hire a lawyer to send threatening emails to anyone that might call you out.
3. Get a few investors that are completely clueless to throw a ton of cash at you for having ai in your product.
4. Profit.
Honestly, get a hold of Louis Rossmann, this shit needs to stop.
Suing the industry won't win them customers/friends.
I suspect they don't care. Their only goal is likely to get enough good PR to sell to some big tech or AI company for an absurd valuation.
Why do we tolerate this bullying and misconduct from companies that harms us and progress overall? Is there really no solution in this day and age for harmful behavior and aggression and hostility like what it looks like Flux is doing here? I can't believe we don't have an answer, I think it's just that the bad guys are drowning us in noise and making it hard for us to identify the solutions where we band together a la David v Goliath against them.
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>The letter further asserts claims under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Adafruit accessed only information that Flux’s own systems made publicly available through a server misconfiguration
A confession
They vibe coded their system and it showed Adafruit something? Or showed some information with trivial prodding? Sounds like your average cross-tenant leak. Maybe showing more than intended or some caching issue. Many options some not really not fault of Adafruit.
Or someone found server.domain/path/subdirectory/resourceX and was like "shit, I was hoping to find resourceY but I can't find a link to it, I wonder if I just click in my address bar and change the X to a Y", and voila, resourceY is right there.
To some of us, this is elementary navigation. Like going up the stairs if the elevator is out. Often it's faster than waiting for the damn elevator, too.
To others, it's cybarrrr-criiiimeeee!!!!!!11111one
People have already been imprisoned for this, one case I can think of off the top of my head is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goatse_Security#AT&T/iPad_emai....
Continental Airlines had an active frequent flyer community. A student emerged as a legendary figure (think "Hunger Games") after she noticed that Continental announcement URLs were numbered sequentially, and a not-yet-released announcement rather unfavorable to current elites was there for anyone to read. Quite the brew-ha-ha. Continental retreated.
She was nevertheless welcome at a frequent flyer event hosted by Continental in Houston, where she beat me at poker.
I don't know the details of the case, but what they worded there is a textbook unauthorized intrusion and a naïve teenager "the door was open" defense.
Mind you there can be nuances, but that quote is like saying "I took their stuff, but it was poking out of their pocket."
I think people have a heightened reaction to threats based on the CFAA for "the door was open" circumstances because that law is so widely known for being used in threats against folks who were trying to ethically report things and in overly-aggressive prosecutions.
Of course, we don't yet know the specifics of this particular case, but I'm willing to lean towards the people receiving legal letters threatening CFAA action until there's more information.
No, it's more like "the door was open" in the context of a storefront. A public website carries an implicit invitation to visit, otherwise web browsing would be illegal.
It is bit grey area. You are evaluating something. Do some basic checks. Actually end up seeing something you should not. You stop and tell them to fix it. They then silence you.
Now it is bit questionable should you check things like this during evaluation or not. Strict legal reading probably not. With reasonable customer relations you thank them and put it on top of the priority list. Unless they clearly enumerated everything they got their hands on or tried to run more real scans.
This is exactly my experience, wasted $60 trying to get it to make something. The founder sent an automated AI email about setting up a time to meet and go through it then ghosted me at the meeting time.
> There are some AI-driven autorouters out there now. Placement is probably the big issue that needs to be solved now.
Interesting that within an IC this is basically "solved", or at least properly automated with classical numeric techniques such as simulated annealing.
I would have thought there's a big opportunity in a mixed-technique approach, where you use AI to extract unstructured data from datasheets and then feed it into more deterministic tools.
I also note that it's very easy to waste more than $100 in electronics once you start actually manufacturing bad PCBs.
> mixed-technique approach
I think my biggest annoyance with the way we rolled out AI is that nobody seemed to want to use it to augment already working solutions.
Just throw everything out and have an LLM do it instead.
I've been frustrated with Copilot in this regard.
I work on a large C++ codebase, with large files. Human developers jump around between files with the Visual Studio fuzzy search, set breakpoints to trace execution in the Debugger, use the IDE's refactoring tools.
Microsoft's answer to this was to just ... expose none of this to their Agent Mode!? Replace the working semantic autocomplete with fucking lies!?
Maybe it's changed, I haven't been paying that much attention after bouncing off of this. I've gotten mild acceleration from using gptel-mode in emacs, manually adding references to context, and having models do various mechanical transformations on code. And I've even had some limited success writing tools for it to do LSP lookups.
I wonder, is the problem here that LSP is updating too slow all the time? Or just that there’s a chance it will update very slow, and you never really know if you’ll hit that chance, so your model always has to do the “long time wait” just in case? It seems like it ought to be possible for LSP to report that it is still processing, in the latter case, somehow…
if it helps, I've found that using context (Claude.md etc) is way less effective for this type of pattern compared to using PreToolHook to capture "bad patterns" and either transparently rewriting them to "do the right thing" if that is possible statically, or if not then rejecting the tool use with a message that tells the agent "how" to use the intended tooling itself.
tool_call is just a fancy wrapper to a black box that executes console commands. Said commands are now the actual backbone of all agentic AI, It feels like the linux people are incredibly vindicated in the single responsibility principle
I recently saw a Claude skill that used Claude, with no tools, as a spell checker.
I wanted to hurl my laptop out to the window.
This type of laziness isn't novel.
Check out left pad or the two dozen other "utility" packages that could be done in a single line of code.
Isn't this pretty much why language models were invented?
Pasting something directly into the chat interface seems weird, but if you could somehow just see where P(token | context) falls off a cliff, that's a pretty good hint that your writing has problem.
I swear that so many AI usecases I see are: "I did not have the skill or realize that you can write a program for this obvious logic".
I guess that works if you aren't a programmer or don't want to hire somebody, but then wtf would I pay for your service or product?
AI can’t really spell check without risking changing the meaning of sentences. Spell checking was a solved problem before this.
AI certainly is the shiny new hammer, and it is tempting to see the world as nails.
Traditional methods might not be perfect, but they also easily fit in the memory of even low power devices. Perhaps it isn't a problem worth burning a dollar of tokens for every spelling mistake.
The fact that it produces correctly spelled words says nothing about it’s ability to find spelling mistakes or to correct them without errors like completely changing the word.
> What would be a better way to incorporate AI as a spell checker?
Don't do a stupid thing like that in the first place.
> In comparison to non-AI traditional tools, AI has the advantage of "understanding" the text, reducing the number of "stupid" mis-corrections.
I doubt it, but if that's true, run a normal spell checker, and then give the output to your LLM to filter.
> what is there to gain by interfacing it with traditional solutions,
About a billionfold improvement in compute efficiency, and a lower error rate.
> and how can it be achieved?
10 seconds of actual thought.
I am skeptical that AI brings any benefit to spell checking at all.
Way too much engineering effort to make something that might get leapfrogged by the next gen LLM.
It's a tantalizing thing, but far too treacherous to actually go for it, most of the time.
There are many domains where a hybrid of numeric and AI approaches would make sense. For example in those domains where there's already a rich practice of numeric tools such as with IC layout.
Something something bitter lesson blah blah
I think the bitter lesson is severely misapplied in the current situation: If progress from "just add more resources" is very slow, and a huge amount of money is at stake, continous work on hand-engineering can give a continuous and very valuable competitive advantage.
The labs all seem to be going for AGI through bigger LLMs, and I am reasonably sure that it's not going to happen like that.
> The labs all seem to be going for AGI through bigger LLMs
I don't know if this is still the case. Labs like anthropic and openai are spending a huge amount of their time on custom model wrappers. Something which they used to leave to their customers.
A few days ago someone on HN commented that a teammate uses Claude to search for text in files on their own computer. Buddy... There's Command-line Tools Can Be 235x Faster Than Your Hadoop Cluster and then there's Command-line Tools Can Be ∞ Faster Than Your AI.
As snark, I've been using the phrase "ask GPT about it" for things that clearly do not need an LLM to be involved. The other day, I was on a zoom call and said it, only to see the present actually doing it. I hope my unmuted laugh wasn't too distracting.
> nobody [wants to use AI] to augment already working solutions
Plenty of people do, but that only produces a blog post that will get you to the front page of HN. If you want VCs to drop $40M on your head, you need to pretend to reinvent the world.
Then, to further appease the rain gods, you need to sue the bloggers on the front page of HN who are challenging your world-changing narrative. Which will, heh, drop you on the front page of HN.
Our community is, literally, eating itself at this point. There was a time when we actually took "make something people want" literally. Now it's just part of the fiction.
That precise mixed technique approach has worked well for me. I’ve been using JITX (python based circuit design with a powerful auto router). Free for personal use, and has been discussed a few times here in HN.
Edit: it’s almost assumed at this point but for completeness Claude / Codex were the ones driving the OO python code and datasheet research and parsing.
https://www.jitx.com/
Until a few years ago it was generally understood that useful "creativity" involves solving problems within constraints, e.g. something a lot like SAT or SMT in spirit even if not in the details.
Then we got LLMs which will make a good parody of anything and occasionally get it right.
Within an IC you don't have large obstructions for metal layers, distances are short, and buffers can be inserted at will to manage SI.
It has been about 20 years since I worked on this (clock gating and clock buffering), but ..
> distances are short
I remember we had a catastrophic error for "wire longer than 2cm".
> and buffers can be inserted at will to manage SI.
Effective buffering of large nets was a massive pain. Areas where you want to buffer are inevitably areas with a very high level of placement congestion. So you push some cells out of the way to add a buffer. That ends up worsening their timing. So they need a bit more sizing/buffering. Rinse and repeat for a few hours.
( https://web.archive.org/web/20071028033035/http://www.edn.co... ; long since absorbed into Cadence)
It is far from solved in IC, synthesis tools sometimes still do really stupid things and there's still quite a lot of hand-holding required to get to a working chip.
And LLM are even stupider and need even more hand-holding
The right use of AI would be to use it to create a better routing/synthesis tool, but that's not what is being worked on
> After about 50-100$ in tokens a couple of times, I couldn't get more than a couple of simple components on the schematic.
Is this common? When I try out new AI tools, even as person who is financially independent, I load up maybe 10-20 USD worth of tokens, and if I don't get anything working from that, I literally give up and don't continue trying. If it can't do anything useful like "place a simple component on the schematic" after ~10 USD of expenditure, is it really worth continue adding more money into the platform? Seems DOA in those cases.
I used company money on it. I was hoping I could massage it along enough to get a workable test fixture out of it. I wanted to put together a simple hardware-in-the-loop tester for a component of our product.
Someone should’ve told these guys: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48337328
I tried this last week and had the same experience. It was terrible and they got $140 out of me before I realized what it was (not) capable of. Their support was nonexistent as well.
All of these Gen AI tools where you pay a subscription fee are basically Software-as-a-Casino. You spin the wheel and hope it doesn't come up 00, then chase good money after bad when it does. Add in the parasocial relationship that some people develop with the LLM and you basically have OnlyFans but instead of vaguely dissatisfying feet pics to order it's vaguely dissatisfying code to order. It's that edge of "almost there, just one more token, bro" that makes it addictive.
That might be the right analogy except it is not clear that it is a house always wins situation.
If you have a .6 chance of success on any particular outcome. Long term win or loss is down to your behaviour. If you double or nothing every time loss is guaranteed. The right strategy will win over the long term.
> Same with most people "doing a startup" or "opening a restaurant".
While I mostly agree with your sentiment, I think there is an important difference. Unless you are attempting advantage play (99.99% of gamblers are not, and casinos ban the few that are), there is literally nothing you can do at a casino to make it a positive EV activity. No amount of skill, drive, effort, or anything other than pure luck can consistently generate profit at a casino.
A startup/business, on the other hand, can be effectived by your actions. Luck obviously plays a large factor, but you have some level of control over the outcome.
> If they can use the AI and get to a point that they can submit a PR that they themselves understand, then technically speaking, what do I care?
This is where my employer has ended up after extremely cautious AI adoption: _must_ be reviewed by a human, and the human whose name is on the gerrit review is responsible for the quality of the work.
For some reason the OpenAI dashboard shows me how much money the company as a whole has spent? It's still a very reasonable-looking amount of money and a tiny fraction of salaries.
I am actually up all the drinks I got comped in Vegas. I sit down at the penny slots and bet one penny one row until I get offered a free drink. I tip the server $3, bet two more pennies for good measure, get up, and walk out with the drink in my hand. I just got like a $3.10 Manhattan for walking around the strip, including tip, courtesy of some business that was low-key trying to scam me and deserves to have less money than they do.
If they cannot mention it how do you know that they have not taken up the offer?
I agree that people will rationalise being in a losing situation as a winning situation. That does not change the fact that winning situations can exist.
> I could only get about 80% of what I wanted together with my hacky workflow.
I literally did this yesterday with solid results using Codex CLI. I used xhigh thinking and gpt 5.5.
I had it use KiCad directly via cli rather than via MCP, and I did make Claude Opus review it's work after every round. I got what I think will be a working revision A in about 10 hours of tinkering spread over a few days.
Is 10 hours a short amount of time for designing a PCB?
Faster than some, slower than some.
PCBs come in all different levels of complexity.
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> Placement is probably the big issue that needs to be solved now.
Would some sort of constraint-solving algorithm help with that? Something like (but not necessarily) Cassowary[0]? Maybe I'm misunderstanding what is meant by placement though; I don't have much domain knowledge in PCBs / electronics.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43362528
I've written my own autoplacer/autorouter. Placement is where you put the components on the board, routing is how you shape the traces to interconnect them.
It does a pretty decent job on small hobby-project boards of ~40 components (which is my use case at the moment), and I'm working part-time in the background on scaling it further.
The resulting designs pass all the KiCad electrical and geometry checks. Granted, I've spent about a year working on this problem, and it's hard, but not that hard a problem, providing you can avoid falling off the exponential cliff by decomposing it into hierarchical subproblems.
Quick-and-dirty unsupervised whole-board synthesis from schematic takes about 5 minutes, longer if you want cleaner output with nicer-looking better-routed traces.
As others here have said, placing is the real problem to solve, and that's where the magic happens. Place the components right, and routing is a relatively easy loosely-coupled constraint programming problem, place them wrongly, and you will have to get used to seeing the word UNFEASIBLE in your log output.
This project sounds very cool. Is it open source? If yes, can you share a link to the repo?