AI PCB design output can look finished and pass every geometric DRC check while being electrically wrong: clean routing, zero DRC errors, and an amplifier with its inputs tied together, or a plausible part number with an invented pinout. DRC checks geometry, not whether the circuit works.
From the 2026-10-04 pain-radar digest (finding 1): the author builds PCB tooling (vendor-adjacent), so treat as practitioner commentary rather than a neutral incident report, hence Low confidence. The failure class itself is named precisely: an LLM hallucinating physical-part reality, which no geometry check can catch. Cost assumes a bench failure caught before fab.