metal-route

metalroute is an experimental Rust PCB autorouter and benchmark-gated LLM self-improvement lab. It reads tscircuit SimpleRouteJson and emits pcb_trace solution soups, routing multilayer boards with deterministic negotiated congestion, targeted A*, bounded rip-up, vias, clearance halos and legalization portfolios, enforcing exact polygonal board outlines and board-edge clearance with native geometric DRC. It exposes a CLI, a tscircuit-compatible /solve server, an interactive route visualizer, corpus benchmarks and a DSN and Freerouting handoff seam. Metal compute kernels for Apple Silicon cover batched shortest-path field computation, but the default real-board negotiated router currently runs on the CPU.

The project is a laboratory for a disciplined loop of hypotheses, code changes, tests, real-board benchmarks and exact audits: form one concrete routing or performance hypothesis, make a narrow attributable change, run deterministic tests and fixed real-board benchmarks, audit geometry, performance and regressions, and keep demonstrated improvements while recording no-go experiments too. "Self-improving" describes the engineering process around the repository; the router does not rewrite itself at runtime.

Current audited result on a corpus of 112 real circuit-derived problems vendored from tscircuit-autorouter: 2,986 of 3,167 routed net segments (94.3 percent), 90 of 112 boards fully routed, 77 of 112 clean boards, 71 of 112 fully routed and clean, with 0 corpus errors. The README states plainly that this is research software, not a production PCB detailed router, and to inspect and verify every generated route before using it in a real design.