MetaForge
Local-first control plane that turns engineering intent and constraints into reviewable hardware deliverables by orchestrating specialist agents that drive KiCad, FreeCAD, CalculiX and SPICE over MCP.
What it does and how it connects
MetaForge is a control plane for hardware design that runs on the user's own machine. The user states a goal and the limits that matter, size, mass, load, budget, standards, and specialist AI agents work through a gated design flow, driving the same tools an engineer would: KiCad, FreeCAD, CadQuery, CalculiX, SPICE, OpenFOAM, and Blender. Every result is saved, versioned, and open to review, and nothing is accepted until a person approves it at a review gate.
Everything is recorded in a digital twin, a versioned graph linking each requirement to the part that meets it and the evidence that proves it. The platform covers parametric CAD, stress and vibration analysis, circuit simulation, airflow, schematic and board checks with KiCad ERC and DRC, BOM and Gerber export, live part stock and price lookups from Digi-Key, Mouser, Nexar, Farnell, and Arrow when keys are added, manufacturing process ranking, and Blender renders.
MetaForge is used through a dashboard with twenty routes covering projects, runs, approvals, the twin, requirements, BOM, simulation, and knowledge, or through the forge command line and an interactive chat. Claude Code and Codex plugins expose the same tools, with writes held for approval. The stack runs on Docker with Compose, needs a model provider API key or a ChatGPT or Codex subscription for AI features, and its prime rule, per the README, is that if a result cannot be versioned, reviewed, and built, MetaForge does not output it.
Alternatives
Compare side by side- Synera
An agentic AI platform whose specialist agents execute on CAD, PLM, FEA, and ERP data, rather than a local-first control plane with gated design flows and a digital twin.
- Tandem
An AI-native hardware development platform linking requirements, CAD changes, and validation evidence, rather than a control plane driving engineering tools over MCP.
- eda-agent
An MCP server letting AI agents read and modify a live Altium Designer session, with an optional KiCad backend, rather than a control plane orchestrating many engineering tools.
- kicad-happy
A suite of agent skills for KiCad design review, EMC pre-compliance, and fab prep, rather than a control plane that runs design flows with human approval gates.
Recurring errors it addresses
Error Index entries this tool is built to reduce or work around.
- run_erc returned passed=true on every real report because it read the wrong JSON level; a faulted drone flight controller showed 2 errors in kicad-cli and 0 in the tool.Error Index
- A non-M3 mounting hole got a bare footprint with no library id, so the Specctra export wrote a nameless component and the routed session import failed, leaving the board with only plane fanout and 96 unconnected items.Error Index
- A clean routed board with 0 unrouted and 0 DRC could not be exported because the guardrail tagged Gerber, BOM and pick-and-place exports DESTRUCTIVE, refusing every fab file export to a remote agent.Error Index
- An agent-run BOM of 7 sourced parts passed every gate while resistors and capacitors had no manufacturer part number, because kicad.export_bom returned only KiCad's default columns, and a fab house can only place what it can buy.Error Index
- In an agent end-to-end run, all 16 requirements were stored with the placeholder expression True and counted as evaluated passes, though requirements like drc_error_count equals 0 and board_length_mm at most 40 were never compared to anything even though the routed board already held those numbers.Error Index
Sources
Not verified
- Pricing: none stated on the repo.
- No independent user voice found: no public issues were read for this page.
- A named individual builder beyond the repository owner handle fidelodok.
Last verified November 6, 2026. Listings are informational. The evidence score measures public, verifiable evidence and is not an endorsement or a compatibility claim.