alt Hacker NewsAdafruit receives demand letter from Fenwick legal counsel on behalf of Flux.ai
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Adafruit probably did a review of AI PCB tools. I've used Flux.ai before; it was a pretty bad experience. After about 50-100$ in tokens a couple of times, I couldn't get more than a couple of simple components on the schematic. And not in sensible positions.
The product just grinds tokens for little return, in my opinion. I had far better luck wiring together KiCad MCP, SKIDL. There are some AI-driven autorouters out there now. Placement is probably the big issue that needs to be solved now. I could only get about 80% of what I wanted together with my hacky workflow.
As an electrical engineer who has tried to use it multiple times, I think Flux is an absolutely awful product. No surprise at all that they want to sweep details about their “intellectual property, commercial traction and user base” under the rug.
Flux just got funding from Bain and others, and it feels like Adafruit was preparing a post about it. Maybe they contacted Flux to confirm some info and they freaked out?
I can't find in archive.org if they had a previous post about it.
Also, seems like there a good bunch of complains in Reddit about Flux and its billing...
https://old.reddit.com/r/PCB/comments/1t476x4/warning_fluxai...
Note that this is not related to Black Forest Labs Flux, the image synthesis models builders, and is instead related to a PCB AI authoring product called Flux.ai.
Had no idea about this. Now I do.
Thank you, lawyers. If you ever find yourself out of work use this as your reference to pivot to advertisement
hi everyone, phil and limor here, any questions for now, email [email protected]
limor and i are very much looking forward to telling our story.
Looks like Flux.ai got some publicity out of this. Maybe not the kind they wanted - after reading this thread, I'll sure never give them a dime.
This is pretty great, in the sense that I'm now very aware I should avoid Flux.ai at all costs, and should recommend to others that they do the same.
From what I can tell, the message is
When you discover an exploit, only communicate with source (and pray they respond) or get sued. Seems like the position is customers and stakeholders shouldn't be allowed access to this information.
I'm not sure if this was Flux, but one of those AI EDA tool companies had a somewhat absurd ad where the narrator stated the AI tool told them a capacitor was being used to block DC, and that's something they never learned while getting an EE degree. Now, I don't have an EE degree, but I feel like how capacitors interact with AC and DC are sort of "passive components 101" that even hobbyists learn quite early on.
The EDA space doesn't strike me as being anywhere near as SWE when it comes to AI.
> Adafruit accessed only information that Flux’s own systems made publicly available through a server misconfiguration
Does anyone have some more context about what happened here? An uncharitable analogy might be that I misconfigured my front door by not locking it, which doesn't give someone the right to walk in and look around - but I have no idea what Adafruit is specifically being accused of doing.
Struck a nerve, but I wouldn’t back down. If they do take you to court, there’s this wonderful thing called discovery.
First I'm hearing of flux.ai and now my opinion of them is entirely negative because they hate free speech!
I wanted to love flux.ai because i love codex... and if i could automate the creation of some PCB projects with as much success as I am with codex it would have been quiet fun in the shop... so i gave them a $100~ bucks and i got like nothing in return so I decided i'd wait and see... sounds like it has not improved.
For those interested in leveraging AI to build circuit boards, check out https://tscircuit.com/
I have no affiliation to the project, just someone that's done some hobby PCB design in the past and a couple weeks ago was exploring what's available in age of AI. Flux looked expensive and unimpressive. While it definitely burned through some tokens, I was able to get a seemingly functional PCB meeting my design requirements and was able to iterate on it using my existing Claude code subscription. I did use Gemini for some of the initial design research and parts selection since I find its search a bit better, but was overall impressed. I think with some tuning of the Claude skills to have it do a bit less guess-and-check it could be a nice workflow. Definitely better than the either really dated or really expensive PCB design tools in the market.
Never heard of Flux.ai before. It seems to be a 3D circuit designer with 'AI'.
Not sure what the issue between them and Adafruit is. However, people over on Reddit¹ claim that Flux.ai is a little bit scummy. They push users into a beginner trial ($5/month) and then silently charge for usage per token - up to $100 per month.
Oh, they also claim that they have "the world's largest community-driven public library of Adafruit products, including footprints, symbols, datasheets, and simulation models"². I wonder whether they designed these themselves or whether they use existing ones. Could not easily find licenses info.
¹) https://www.reddit.com/r/PCB/comments/18o5zfo/thoughts_on_fl...
I tried flux and it was a total waste of time. I get the idea it’s for rank beginners, maybe it’s useful at that level?
Honestly, I haven’t seen an autorouter that doesn’t take at least as much time as it takes to do it by hand to sort out the results. But then I’m also not paying thousands for premium tools, so???
I find that with some experience, routing and placement is kinda the fun part..
> Adafruit’s reporting concerns a matter of public security interest and was conducted in the ordinary course of responsible disclosure
This whole think is crazy. We’re being expected to pay to develop their tools which quite frankly are fairly poor. I’m sure at some point they will get better but like the AI code, its volume over quantity. Code and PCB design is part science and part art. The AI boy do neither well. I have had several frustrating sessions trying to explain a simple concept to it and burning through tokens to do something an intern would be able to do in an hour. For code it’s a good sounding board and for PCB’s it’s a waste of a good designers time. And if you point this out? A desist letter.. that says to me they know the systems are floored, buggy and not value for money..
Flux.ai offers a PCB design solution which is a clear interest for Adafruit. Anyone have any idea what this is about?
I was surprised they didn't publish the text of the demand letter verbatim.
I previously had a passing interest in Flux, now I'm certain it's a fraud.
Had anyone tried AutoPCB (https://autopcb.app/) instead?
Seems especially useful when paired with an agentic coding tool!
> Adafruit accessed only information that Flux’s own systems made publicly available through a server misconfiguration.
Did they access it knowing that there was a server misconfiguration or was this only learned of after the fact? Because Computer Fraud and Abuse is pretty serious.
I love the transparency that Adafruit is proving on this.
Despite the lack of context (as is expected when gangsters like Fenwick and West get involved -- i've gotten letters from them), I will throw my lot in with Adafruit. The people who run Adafruit have been nothing but upstanding and reasonable the entire time that business has existed. I'm willing to bet that they are in the right knowing only that -- it is enough.
Are there any AI tools that can create quality PCB work yet?
For anyone that has been missing the memo on how to become rich:
1. Make a slop machine that's a wrapper around another slop machine like claude, openai, google or whatever.
2. Hire a lawyer to send threatening emails to anyone that might call you out.
3. Get a few investors that are completely clueless to throw a ton of cash at you for having ai in your product.
4. Profit.
Honestly, get a hold of Louis Rossmann, this shit needs to stop.
Suing the industry won't win them customers/friends.
SICP Erlang on cargo-fuzzed relay.
Why do we tolerate this bullying and misconduct from companies that harms us and progress overall? Is there really no solution in this day and age for harmful behavior and aggression and hostility like what it looks like Flux is doing here? I can't believe we don't have an answer, I think it's just that the bad guys are drowning us in noise and making it hard for us to identify the solutions where we band together a la David v Goliath against them.
Flux.ai is probably trying to hide the fact their product does not do what it says it does and they're basically scamming you out of your money (won't even refund you for prompts that did not do what they said they would do.) The entire thing was trash when I tried it two years ago and it's still very much trash now, not even able to do a basic TSOP LED driver without you needing to spend hundreds of dollars to correct its mistakes.
Extremely embarrassing for my country that this is what the FBI is spending time on.
now I have a moral reason (in addition to clear engineering reasons) to never use Flux!
They lost me at subscription hell. Thanks, won’t touch this shit with a ten foot pole.
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>The letter further asserts claims under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Adafruit accessed only information that Flux’s own systems made publicly available through a server misconfiguration
A confession
I hadn’t even heard of flux.ai til now. Going to give it a spin tonight.
hi everyone, its me 'ladyada. we're very much looking forward to telling our story, i have reached out to the founder of flux.ai (Matthias Wagner - Founder & CEO at Flux), in hopes we can resolve this together and set a good example for the community. looking forward to maybe seeing this resolved on a podcast together, or something