For the benefit of a layman, can you explain why this is so much different than a human doing it?

Like sure it didn’t have the inclination to make the sim and hardware designs, but it did make them though yes?

How many "prompts" from our parents, teachers, bosses, etc. it took for all of us to come here and discuss this? Or for that human to think of that prompt for that LLM?

These are clearly rhetorical questions, but think of the metaphysical implication of your contestation. Ex nihilo nihil fit.

What if that initial prompt never asked for this hardware to be developed, and it was just one piece of the puzzle to answer to that prompt? That it took a chain of thousands of agents to prompt each others to come up with that?

AI (GPT-Sol-6:xhigh) isn't even capable of using Altium to re-layout a board without introducing a bunch of problems by a user who isn't an electrical engineer or familiar with board layouts.

Can't LLMs also prompt LLMs?

Are we confident that no existing LLM is capable of similarly effective prompts to those this author used? (I agree it's a stretch, but would not reject it out of hand.)

Even if not yet, will the existence of this repo soon change that, because LLMs will soon ingest it?

AI is capable of developing its own inference hardware, once a prompt is given. The fact that a human happens to kick it off here is not especially relevant to the fact that an AI is performing the task independently. There are plenty of ways a text prompt can be generated: a harness, another LLM, or just removing stop tokens so that once begun the AI will continue until its hardware fails.

It's not clear what this fad of attributing everything an AI does to the human prompting it is supposed to accomplish.

perhaps, but prompting is quickly becoming another area where humans are no longer clearly superior.

Getting LLMs to prompt other LLMs in a loop is not hard, it doesn't produce great results most of the time, but that is changing.