{"slug": "i-built-an-ai-pcb-designer-the-routing-engine-has-no-ai-in-it-here-s-why", "title": "I built an AI PCB designer. The routing engine has no AI in it, here's why.", "summary": "Dibyaprakash Pradhan, the developer of PCBEditor.com, built an AI-powered PCB design tool that uses a hybrid approach, deliberately excluding AI from the routing engine to maintain determinism. The platform employs over 200 expert AI agents for tasks such as footprint generation, ball-map generation, placement optimization via the Fortza model, and 3D STEP file retrieval, while relying on rule-based code for routing and DRC checks.", "body_md": "# I built an AI PCB designer. The routing engine has no AI in it, here's why.\n\nI am going to tell a short product development story from my recent personal experience. AI vs No AI, what I have chosen and why. When it comes to deterministic systems, you always have to rethink choosing AI for what parts of the system. When I started building PCBEditor.com it was a similar challe\n\nI am going to tell a short product development story from my recent personal experience. AI vs No AI, what I have chosen and why. When it comes to deterministic systems, you always have to rethink choosing AI for what parts of the system. When I started building PCBEditor.com it was a similar challenge for me. When you talk about PCB design, there are different stages. First schematics. You need to decide what and which electronics parts you want to use. For that, I had built a product called AI Inventory Management: you can upload the invoices of your purchases and you can use those parts for designing your PCBs. Next is electrically valid netlists, footprints (footprint generator using AI), ball-map generation using AI. What I decided to do is a hybrid approach, which means not everything should be generated by AI. Instead, building internal libraries as well, which can be reliably used. Then there comes the placement engine. You need to calculate the placements, so what I did is set multiple different rules like thermal warnings, electrical signal fluctuation rules, etc., and let my AI model (Fortza decide which is the best placement option to pick for the current design. Then comes DRC, hundreds of code files with thousands of lines in them. It ensures the board passes the DRC check, and then you can 3D view it. Once the board is generated you always want to see a 3D view of it so that you know how it will look when it is printed. For that, finding officially licensed 3D STEP files can be done using our AI model. Then there are a few important stages like layer selection and quality gate verification. These all happen in an agentic system with more than 200 expert AI agents working together to produce the best possible industry-standard outcome for your designed PCB. I would love to hear from people out here. Have you ever tried designing a PCB using AI? What do you think the split should be between probabilistic and deterministic usage in this use case? 50-50? 60-40? 90-10?\n\n## Key Takeaways\n\n- •I am going to tell a short product development story from my recent personal experience\n- •This story was reported by\n**Dev.to**, covering developments in the** dev**space. - •AI advancements continue to reshape industries — read the full article on Dev.to for complete coverage.\n\n📖 Continue reading the full article:\n\n[Read Full Article on Dev.to →](https://dev.to/dibyaprakash_pradhan/i-built-an-ai-pcb-designer-the-routing-engine-has-no-ai-in-it-heres-why-2ac5)", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-built-an-ai-pcb-designer-the-routing-engine-has-no-ai-in-it-here-s-why", "canonical_source": "https://ainexusdaily.vercel.app/article/2026-09-01-i-built-an-ai-pcb-designer-the-routing-engine-has-no-ai-in-it-heres-why", "published_at": "2026-09-01 10:53:48+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-01 11:52:49.074953+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-tools", "ai-agents", "ai-products"], "entities": ["PCBEditor.com", "Dibyaprakash Pradhan", "Fortza", "Dev.to"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-built-an-ai-pcb-designer-the-routing-engine-has-no-ai-in-it-here-s-why", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-built-an-ai-pcb-designer-the-routing-engine-has-no-ai-in-it-here-s-why.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-built-an-ai-pcb-designer-the-routing-engine-has-no-ai-in-it-here-s-why.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-built-an-ai-pcb-designer-the-routing-engine-has-no-ai-in-it-here-s-why.jsonld"}}