TRADEOFFS · 1 Jan 2026 · 1h 01m · Episode 10
Narayan Powderly and Ioannis Papamanoglou, co-CEOs of atopile, discuss their command-line circuit design tool that brings software development practices to hardware engineering. They explain how their frustration with slow board development cycles at Tesla and smart bike lock projects led them to create a domain-specific language that captures design intent rather than just schematics. The guests detail how atopile integrates with KiCad for layout, leverages LLMs for rapid iteration, and aims to empower full-stack engineers by automating the drudgery of component selection and validation.
Where this conversation describes AI being used to build or deliver a product. Part of the AI in practice tracker.
Design
The team used LLMs to automatically convert existing Adafruit product designs into their domain-specific language (atopile), leveraging the tool's self-validation constraints to ensure the generated code was functional and correct.
“One of the little projects we've dabbled in is like, you have this Adafruit product catalog … And we just the LLMs rip through them and be like, let's rebuild this in Attober. And they were good at it.”
Ioannis · Hear it at 26:35
Designatopile (self-validation)
The atopile tool uses its domain-specific language to provide immediate feedback to LLMs and human designers, catching electrical errors like voltage rail mismatches before physical prototyping, which drastically reduces iteration cycles.
“in R2, since every voltage rail has its own constraint … if you connect them together, the two is going to be like, I think you're going have a bad You might reconsider this. And that really closes the loop on the LLMs.”
Ioannis · Hear it at 28:05
early-stage companies
Other shows on the same ground, closest first.
Ioannis Papamanoglou and Narayan Powderly, co-founders of atopile, explain their code-based, AI-driven approach to PCB design, arguing that hardware has lagged behind software in tooling automation. They discuss how capturing engineering intent in code allows for deterministic design and seamless integration with tools like Altium Designer and LTspice, shifting the designer's role from boilerplate tasks to system architecture. The founders highlight the importance of connecting disconnected tools to improve supply chain resilience and firmware integration, while noting that the bottleneck for AI in hardware is orchestration rather than model capability.
Duncan Haldane, co-founder and CEO of JITX, explains how his company uses a code-based design flow to automate circuit board design, targeting senior engineers to make expert knowledge reusable and scalable. He discusses the transition from his background as a Guinness world-record-holding roboticist at Berkeley to building a tool that generates schematics and layouts from functional descriptions rather than manual drafting. Haldane details JITX's evolution from a DARPA-funded research project and design consultancy to a commercial product, emphasizing the importance of baking verification checks into component models to handle supply chain volatility and design complexity.
Duncan Haldane, CEO and co-founder of JITX, explains how his company allows engineers to design circuit boards by writing code, addressing the industry's need for stronger correctness guarantees and reusability. He discusses his background in bio-inspired robotics at UC Berkeley, including the Salto jumping robot and origami mechanisms, which highlighted the limitations of traditional hardware design tools. Haldane details JITX's approach of embedding rigorous checks into a Python-based language to prevent design errors, its integration with KiCad and Altium, and the company's recent Series A funding from Sequoia Capital.
Valentina Ratner and Kyle Dumont, co-founders of Allspice, explain their mission to bring Git-style version control and collaboration workflows to hardware engineering, addressing the industry's reliance on outdated methods like printed schematics and PDFs. Chrissy Meyer, a general partner at Root Ventures, discusses her transition from electrical engineering at Apple to VC, explaining how she recognized the visceral pain of inefficient design reviews and invested in Allspice to solve these collaboration gaps. The team details how Allspice Hub enables asynchronous design reviews and connects disparate tools, aiming to bridge the gap between electrical engineering and software development practices.
Tomide Adesanmi, co-founder and CEO of Circuit Mind, explains how his background designing head-worn displays for fighter pilots at BAE Systems revealed the inefficiencies of manual schematic design. He founded Circuit Mind to replace tedious spreadsheet work and datasheet searching with deterministic algorithms that generate optimized circuit schematics from block diagrams. Adesanmi details the platform's ability to explore millions of design combinations for cost, size, and power, positioning the tool as a 'circuit solver' that allows engineers to act as architects rather than manual drafters.
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