I asked Claude to design a PCB. Here's exactly where it stopped working.

I have been building an AI-native PCB editor for a few months. Before I wrote a line of it, I did the obvious thing: I opened Claude and asked it to design a board.

The result taught me more about where AI belongs in hardware than any amount of planning would have.

What went well, and it genuinely did

I asked for a 5V to 3.3V regulator circuit for an ESP32 sensor node.

Claude gave me a sensible answer. It picked an AMS1117-3.3, explained why an LDO was fine here rather than a buck converter given the current draw, and told me to put a 10µF on the input and 22µF on the output. When I asked why the output capacitor was larger, it explained the LDO's stability requirement properly.