{"id":748,"date":"2026-05-18T03:55:43","date_gmt":"2026-05-18T03:55:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/millermattson.com\/dave\/?p=748"},"modified":"2026-05-18T04:30:34","modified_gmt":"2026-05-18T04:30:34","slug":"a-case-study-in-agentic-circuit-design-for-the-frugal-hardware-hacker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/millermattson.com\/dave\/?p=748","title":{"rendered":"A Case Study in Agentic Circuit Design for the Frugal Hardware Hacker"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>This report asks whether an independent hardware developer who cannot afford frontier model API costs can use low-token-cost models in an agentic harness to design, simulate, and document a simple electronic circuit. I asked two low-cost LLMs, one locally hosted and one remote, to develop a hardware random bit generator where randomness is extracted from avalanche noise in a reversed-biased semiconductor junction, displaying one random bit on an LED each time a button is pressed. The models were prompted to simulate their circuit designs with ngspice and to generate schematics and parts lists. Both models failed to produce a working circuit design. Schematic drawing failed entirely despite remediation attempts with more capable models. I conclude that low-token-cost agentic AI does not offer meaningful assistance to the frugal hardware hacker. This reinforces a broader concern that capable agentic AI tools are out of reach for independent developers who have to buy tokens with grocery money.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/millermattson.com\/dave\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Agentic-Circuit-Design-v2.pdf\" data-type=\"attachment\" data-id=\"747\">Click here for the full PDF report.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This report asks whether an independent hardware developer who cannot afford frontier model API costs can use low-token-cost models in an agentic harness to design, simulate, and document a simple electronic circuit. I asked two low-cost LLMs, one locally hosted and one remote, to develop a hardware random bit generator where randomness is extracted from [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":750,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[83,132],"tags":[86,133,104],"class_list":["post-748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ai","category-electronics","tag-ai","tag-electronics","tag-llm"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/millermattson.com\/dave\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/millermattson.com\/dave\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/millermattson.com\/dave\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/millermattson.com\/dave\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/millermattson.com\/dave\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=748"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/millermattson.com\/dave\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/748\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":749,"href":"https:\/\/millermattson.com\/dave\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/748\/revisions\/749"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/millermattson.com\/dave\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/millermattson.com\/dave\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/millermattson.com\/dave\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/millermattson.com\/dave\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}