Round-tripping a KiCad footprint through Circuit JSON renames unconnected pads. Pad MP1 comes back as 5 and SH2 as 6, because unconnected pads have no linked source port. Mounting and shield pads quietly lose the names the footprint and assembly drawings depend on.
Recurring agent failure issue in circuit-json-to-kicad (tscircuit)
What engineers report
A recurring agent failure problem in circuit-json-to-kicad (tscircuit) that mostly hits the electrical engineer.
Failure pattern: validation / failure
Analyst note
From the Grok pain-radar digests, Nov 10-11 2026 (Nov 10 8:41 AM ET through Nov 11 7:41 AM ET digests plus the Haitch editions). Verified live 2026-11-11: issue/PR read; title and state confirmed.
What it costs a team
Modeled annual cost
$30,000
For a team of 5
Prototype delay
3 days
Modeled schedule slip per occurrence
Time lost
240 min
Per engineer per month, about 1 incidents
How the cost is modeled
240 min/month × 5 engineers × 12 months = 240 hours × $125/hour = $30,000
A modeled estimate with medium confidence. Swap in your own team size and loaded rate to size it for your team.
Engineering tools that address it
No engineering tool profile lists this error yet. Browse tools that connect to circuit-json-to-kicad (tscircuit).
Evidence
More recurring errors in circuit-json-to-kicad (tscircuit)
- Companion repro PR to #784: it runs KiCad outside the assertions so a crashed tool cannot count as a successful repro of the dropped 0.20 mm edge clearance.ECAD · impact 74
- Each standalone via also produced an empty footprint with no reference, so a board with 16 thermal and stitching vias imported 16 unresolved NOREF BOM lines with footprint Unknown at CircuitHub. The vias themselves exported fine, so the board looked right and the BOM was wrong.ECAD · impact 74
- Repro for lost solder paste apertures on KiCad export: of six explicit apertures (a reduced linked one, four component-owned stencil windows, a standalone circle), the export keeps one, expands it to the copper size, and drops the other five, which goes straight into the stencil.ECAD · impact 74
- The KiCad project exporter dropped the board's authored min edge clearance. On a reduction of a real NEMA34 controller, 0.20 mm became KiCad's default 0.50 mm, and KiCad 10.0.5 reported 4 copper-edge findings on a track with about 0.445 mm clearance. The fix is three lines.ECAD · impact 74
- Two red LEDs in tscircuit, one with its pin labels swapped. The export writes two definitions under one lib id and KiCad resolves both parts through one of them. kicad-cli's netlist on main puts R1 on D1 pin 2 when the source says pin 1. ERC shows the same 16 violations before and after, so the check says nothing about the flipped LED.ECAD · impact 74
- When two components pointed at different 3D models sharing a basename (body.step), the KiCad export wrote both to the same file in .3dshapes so one overwrote the other and footprint model paths pointed at the wrong STEP.ECAD · impact 74
Sourced from public community reports. Costs and delays are modeled estimates, not measurements. Know a better source or a fix? Tell us at hello@productflo.io.