Later routing phases lost geometry and net identity from earlier phases, which caused false open connections, duplicate ground escapes and clearance violations. A 0.005 mm numeric tolerance accepted a 0.0976 mm gap, and a 1e-9 mm placeholder could export as a zero-width Gerber aperture.
Recurring agent failure issue in tscircuit-autorouter (tscircuit)
What engineers report
A recurring agent failure problem in tscircuit-autorouter (tscircuit) that mostly hits the electrical engineer.
Failure pattern: validation / geometry
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 tscircuit-autorouter (tscircuit).
Evidence
More recurring errors in tscircuit-autorouter (tscircuit)
- Obstacle filtering used a rotated exclusion zone's unrotated width and height, so the zone was dropped and the router reported solved: true while routing straight through it.ECAD · impact 82
- Bus length matching measures only newly routed copper, so it can report skew success while retained fanout copper breaks it, repro A at 19 mm against B at 10 mm against a 0.1 mm limit with zero DRC errors.ECAD · impact 74
- Regional DDR repair could clear DRC errors by putting vias in signal pads, even with allowViaInPad set to false. On a real A13 circuit forbidden vias went from 3 to 0 after the fix, with 7 other clearance errors still open. An automated fixer optimizing for "DRC clean" broke a rule the designer had set.ECAD · impact 74
- A PCB autorouter lost component-pad targets on one dataset board, so a 1.72 mm QFP connection ran out of search; nearly coincident top and bottom SMT terminals could also collapse into one identity during stitching, and an upstream simplifier measured a 39.56 mm route as 2,248.36 mm and silently polled its failed child.ECAD · impact 66
- Joint repair now uses the same 0.2 mm default non-plated-hole clearance as DRC, the same shape as #3422 but smaller. It is part of an 11-PR stack that starts with pinning a dataset to corrected Altium source rules (#3423).ECAD · impact 66
- One repair stage of the router passed a hardcoded 0.1 mm trace clearance while the board declared 0.45 mm, and the next stage enforced 0.45 mm. Candidates got rejected and pad/trace DRC violations stayed. Two stages of one tool held different clearance rules for the same board.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.