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trace (mteichtahl)ECADConfidence: Medium

An agent harness for KiCad boards. On one run, a worker "could not pass the brief's flags to kicad.fab. It renamed Gerbers to Protel extensions, could not clip silkscreen from mask, got one merged drill file with every hole marked plated, wrote an empty -NPTH.drl by hand, and dropped the .gbrjob." The fix adds the missing inputs, then checks after plotting that file names, the job file and plated vs unplated hole counts match the board. Anything not applied fails the run and the summary says not to send the package. The worker prompt now forbids renaming, editing or hand-writing fab files.

Impact Analysis

Persona
Electrical Engineer
Team Size Impact
5x Multiplier
Prototype Delay
3 Days
Est. Annual Cost
$30,000
  • 1 user · 1 month240 min
  • Rest of team960 min
  • Rest of year13,200 min

monthly_minutes × 12 × team_multiplier ÷ 60 × $75/hr = $30k/yr

$75/hr assumed rate.

Annual team-minutes decomposed from the reported monthly inputs.

Evidence & Sources

1 Sources

Analyst Notes

From the Grok pain-radar digests, Nov 2 2026 (Nov 2 8:41 AM ET through Nov 2 10:41 PM ET digests plus the Haitch editions). Verified live 2026-11-03: issue/PR read; title and state confirmed.