When a symbol extends a base symbol, every private library field shares one merge key, so only the last survives on the placed part. The netlist is fine and KiCad opens the sheet. The design notes are just gone.
Recurring agent failure issue in KiCad-AI-Assistant (paul356)
What engineers report
A recurring agent failure problem in KiCad-AI-Assistant (paul356) that mostly hits the electrical engineer.
Failure pattern: agent / failure
Analyst note
From the Grok pain-radar digests, Nov 8-9 2026 (Nov 8 8:41 AM ET through Nov 9 6:41 AM ET digests plus the Haitch editions). Verified live 2026-11-09: 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 KiCad-AI-Assistant (paul356).
Evidence
More recurring errors in KiCad-AI-Assistant (paul356)
- On Windows with a machine-wide proxy, the system bypasses localhost but not 127.0.0.1, and the plugin always calls its MCP server at 127.0.0.1, so every tool call went to the proxy and failed. The plugin then wrongly reported KiCad IPC API not enabled, sending users to a preference that was already set correctly.ECAD · impact 74
- Symbols with pins numbered P$1, P$2 could not map to footprints with pads 1, 2, and the agent had no tool to change a pin number, only to read pins. KiCad keeps two copies of a symbol, the .kicad_sym library and the schematic's embedded lib_symbols cache, and a library edit does not update the cache that KiCad actually draws for placed parts.ECAD · impact 74
- The agent called get_skill 0 times while calling set_footprint_position 600+ times, even after the skill catalog was made mandatory in the prompt, so the agent never reads handed context unless the tool layer injects it.ECAD · impact 74
- The KiCad AI Assistant plugin would not show up in KiCad after following the README: the bundled README told users to copy the folder in as kicad_ai_plugin while the archive root is kicad_ai_assistant, and gave %APPDATA%\kicad\<ver>\scripting\plugins as the Windows target instead of <Documents>\KiCad\<ver>\3rdparty\plugins. The required Preferences, Plugins, Enable KiCad API step was undocumented, setup_plugin.bat failed silently with no exit-code propagation, and uv was an undocumented prerequisite. The MCP bridge did not work until several environment fixes.ECAD · impact 74
- A KiCad AI plugin's update check has failed against every published release, because it needs a checksum file that no release carries. It reports check your network connection for every failure and logs nothing, and the author found 0 matching log lines out of 622,924.ECAD · impact 66
- A KiCad AI plugin's updater reported failure after a successful install, because every probe failure collapsed into 'unknown version' with no log line, and the same false reading triggered needless dependency upgrades.ECAD · impact 66
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.