Agentic PCB Release Gate

An agentic tool that closes the gap between "the schematic looks done" and "the board is actually manufacturable." It ingests a KiCad project and produces a contract-manufacturer-ready release package plus a human-readable report — and, where safe, fixes problems on its own.

The Motivation

Hardware has a costly design-to-production gap: a board can pass a designer's eye and still fail at the fab for boilerplate reasons — missing drill files, incomplete BOMs, netlist mismatches, DRC violations. These are exactly the checks that are tedious for humans and easy to skip under deadline. The release gate makes clearing that bar the default, not an afterthought.

What It Produces

• A CM-ready release ZIP: Gerbers, drill files, BOM, pick-and-place, IPC-D-356 netlist, and PDFs.
• A structured report (JSON + HTML) that explains every problem in human terms.

How LLMs Are Integrated — Safely

The architecture separates a trusted deterministic engine from a helpful-but-not-trusted LLM:

• The deterministic engine runs checks, exports, applies fixes, and re-checks. It must be correct.
• The LLM agent is planner and triager: it reads findings, chooses from a constrained menu of approved fix operations, writes explanations, and asks clarifying questions.
• Crucially, the agent never free-edits copper. It may only select pre-approved, reversible operations, and the loop repeats until the project passes the gate or hands back to a human.

This is the pattern I believe production agentic systems need: LLMs for judgment, deterministic tools for correctness, and a hard boundary between the two.

Stack

Python · KiCad CLI · LLM agents · Deterministic checks