Atopile is another thing in the circuits-as-code space: https://github.com/atopile/atopile
As a half EE/half SWE I think there are significant benefits to circuits as code but I'm not impressed with this one. Atopile has a narrower focus (autorouters are really really hard) and doesn't use as many buzzwords. Like why on earth does a "web first approach" matter at all for hardware development?
But also, GUI tools are getting better, Kicad 9 had a lot of changes that made templating / reusing blocks easier. And it works fine if not great with version control.
I don't see circuit-as-code taking off with humans anytime soon, it's much better but not enough better to convince EEs many of which don't code much or at all. But I can see it becoming much more common as LLMs get better at complex circuits.
It's probably a simple economics thing. You can hire out a contract PCB design for a reasonable cost and the long poll is getting back physical prototypes. Contrast to HDLs displacing schematic based designs for ASICs and programmable logic, where simulation allows for rapid development.
> I don't see circuit-as-code taking off with humans anytime soon
I don't agree with this. Circuits aren't really anything more complex than anything else humanity has had to figure out. Most knowledge in this area seems solvable.
Maxwell's equations have been known for a century.
For whatever reason, Software Engineering and Hardware Engineering even though they rely upon the same fundamental physics, are so very different? And apparently can't be reconciled? No. I don't believe it.
PCB layout is as much art and black magic as it is science. I'm not sure why you dismiss the complexity so easily, this definitely is not just a matter of applying Maxwell's equations.
Layout is a puzzle, especially with particularly high density layouts, but some of this is ameliorated by high layer count and fine trace/space boards becoming cheaper. Definitely not black magic. RF layout is black magic, let's not steal their thunder here.
High speed PCBs are RF. At high enough frequencies, traces become waveguides, and the result cannot be predicted analytically. Simulation is your only light in this mess.
> For whatever reason, Software Engineering and Hardware Engineering even though they rely upon the same fundamental physics
Software engineering isn't a thing besides being an ego title.
Software is "ship now, patch later"
Hardware is engineered, it must be correctly designed from the beginning and cannot be easily modified in the field
I don't know why anyone wants to shove big heavy applications into browsers. Are they imagining you'd use your phone for this?
Are we not teaching kids how to publish desktop applications these days or what?
It's just not that we are imagining that people will be using phone to build PCB's, we also have a cli which perform better than the browser playground!
My guess is the cross platform story.
For cross platform development we barely have any decent, free development tools. It's a lot easier to find JavaScript developers in most places than c++/c# developers.