copperhead (copperheadhq) errors

10 recurring problems engineers report in copperhead (copperheadhq), ranked by impact.

#43 by errors trackedECAD

Recurring copperhead (copperheadhq) errors, by impact

  1. 1An agent PCB tool cannot refill copper zones, so on pour-heavy boards people bypass it with scripts and lose every check it provides. On one power board that happened three times in a day, and each time the change was made with a pcbnew Python script plus kicad-cli drc --refill-zones --save-board, which bypasses the spec gate, its ERC/DRC verification and its rollback.ECAD · Agent failure · 1 report74
  2. 2An AI board-creation agent ran part selection on a 283-row BOM with a fixed 40-turn budget, when the job needs about 104 turns. When the agent said at turn 37 that it could not finish in the turns left, the runner did not treat that as budget exhaustion, so retries got the same budget and every verified symbol, pin, footprint and part swap was thrown away on rollback. The fix caches verified parts in a file so retries keep them.ECAD · Agent failure · 1 report74
  3. 3The agent's finish gate wanted zero ERC and DRC violations. On LibreSolar's BMS C1, an imported board with 368 ERC findings and 168 DRC findings, the requested rename ended "stalled" and was rolled back. The fix records ERC and DRC before the first edit and only fails on findings the run added. Any agent working on a real, inherited design needs to know what the design looked like before it touched it.ECAD · Agent failure · 1 report74
  4. 4The maintainer found copperhead's pin-to-net answers wrong on 51.6% of pins across 17 KiCad demo projects when checked against KiCad's own netlist.ECAD · Agent failure · 1 report74
  5. 5A CI runner image change quietly swapped KiCad 10 for KiCad 9 (ubuntu-latest moved to 26.04 and the KiCad PPA had no build for that image variant), so every PR then failed with 27 board and schematic load errors in tests it never touched.ECAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  6. 6A refused part-selection attempt rolled back all already-verified symbols and footprints, and the run only passed after the user hand-raised the stage budget from 40 to 120 turns.ECAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  7. 7An agent that takes a hardware project through eight stages from spec to KiCad schematic and firmware could mark a stage done with a comment-only spec, a schematic sheet with zero symbols, or empty firmware folders, and the next stage would build on that after a resume.ECAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  8. 8Automated schematic drafting on dense real KiCad designs produced six error-severity collisions because fixed-length stubs and symbol graphics made valid routes look blocked.ECAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  9. 9In a KiCad draft agent, numbered headings in SUBSYSTEMS.md (## 1. Power) didn't match unnumbered intent group names, which generated hundreds of false rejection findings and deadlocks; the agent's context doc and its validator disagreed on formatting, and the run stalled.ECAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  10. 10The Copperhead draft engine kept merging nets on a dense sheet: ESTOP_SENSE touching GND at a wire endpoint dead-ended the run at stage 4 with no lever left after two retries.ECAD · Agent failure · 1 report66

How it fails

  1. Agent failure10

Sourced from public community reports. Costs and delays on individual entries are modeled estimates, not measurements.