An AI-driven PCB build pipeline ran its 3D interference gate against a cached mesh from the previous board revision because the loader hard-coded the prior package path. It reported zero interferences on a board that had three real ones, including parts inside a headphone jack's moulded body.

Analyst Notes

From the 2026-10-07 pain-radar digest (finding 15): first-person case study from a real board build (149 components). Single-builder evidence, but the failure is concrete and named with part counts. The author's own rule after the incident: never let a gate read a cached or hard-coded input path.