Lack of hardware tools

Bugbot is one of Cursor’s highest revenue products that does code review summaries and checks for errors. It breaks when it comes to hardware.

I gave Bugbot a KiCad file and asked it to fix the errors. It deleted two components.

We have all these tools that make software engineers more efficient, but there’s a massive gap when it comes to tools for hardware engineers.

Part of the reason is that general AI models still struggle to reason about the physical constraints and interconnected dynamical systems that define hardware development.

A component is not just a line of code. It might come with a hundred page datasheet defining voltage limits, thermal behavior, tolerances, mechanical constraints, dependencies, and interactions with everything around it. A change to one component propagates through the electrical, mechanical, thermal, and manufacturing systems around it.

As a systems engineer, one of my favorite studies was dynamical systems. You can model any complex systems as graphs, where understanding the emergent behavior and dominant properties of the system can be far more informative than understanding the connections alone.

I think hardware AI will need to learn in a similar way.

To reason reliably over schematics, CAD, datasheets, requirements, and engineering changes, models need to understand not only what components are connected, but how those components behave together as a dynamical system.

That is part of what we are building toward with Flashwise.

Flashwise starts as a copilot that documents engineering changes and keeps knowledge synced across hardware teams. As it learns within a company’s secure environment, it can build an increasingly rich understanding of that company’s components, interdependencies, decisions, constraints, and engineering workflows.

Over time, that creates the foundation for something much more powerful: AI that can actually reason about hardware changes, grounded in an understanding of the dynamics of the underlying system.

And eventually, a true hardware code review.