alt Hacker NewsI largely agree with your friend. There's a big difference between it being possible, and it being adopted. A startup could come out with cutting edge AI integrated eCAD tools tomorrow, and ten years from now Apple will still be using Cadence to design the iPhone.
Basically, unless the legacy eCAD companies decide to add it themselves, there's too much pain involved in switching tools — and even with that caveat, Cadence specifically is too much of a dinosaur to integrate it effectively anyway.
That said, there's a big distinction depending on whether your friend works primarily on the schematic or layout side.
I second the friend's opinion.
A lot of the people who post online have no experience with the paid PCB tools and those tools already have quite a lot of automation, and the automation interfaces work between different CAD & EDA vendors. Shared, hierarchical, and repurposed schematics are also totally a thing.
I spend almost no time on boiler plate stuff. And with good constraints, which require serious thought and understanding, tons of routing & checks can be automated too. Right now.
So, IMHO, there is not a lot of fat in the process for AI to automate away without a lot more EE and physics models, and the ability to interpret multiple specs, built in. And the current AI tools are very far from that.