Install Adom - AI PCB designer - Fusion Electronics POS...

Let's try out Adom's AI electronics design tool. On the face of it, you can get it to design a complete PCBA from a fairly broad specification and submit it to your favourite CEM's portal, then receive it through the post a week or so later.

The demo project is a buck converter, built using Fusion Electronics (was Eagle before it was acquired by Autodesk). Reviews are "mixed", so although I've never used it myself, I'm a bit uncertain what I'll find.

The Adom Hydrogen installation walk-through is here 

This product actually runs natively in Linux, so the installation creates a Linux-within-Windows environment called WSL2 ("Windows Subsystem for Linux").

You then connect up your preferred AI agent - in my case this is Claude Code, for which I have a subscription.

And here it is - recognisably Claude Code running in a VSC panel:

Click the logo top left and select Setup Steps under the Admin subsection title. This confirms it's finished:

Select the Fusion bridge (tab on right side of panel).

Intro demo.... ooof!

But - it needs permissions. Is this why it froze?

I got Adom’s “Hydrogen” all set up and running with Fusion. Horny looking GUI, a lot of it did indeed install fairly seamlessly. It uses Claude Code within Visual Studio Code within Hydrogen and directly manipulates Fusion as you watch (or sleep). Perhaps unsurprisingly things didn't work so well thereafter.

I have a mid range PC (Ryzen 5600, 32GB RAM, integrated graphics with initially 0.5GB, then increased to 4GB video RAM, 6 cores, 12 threads, 250GB SSD). 2 of the 3 monitors are driven by a USB-C dock (with Displayport drivers). But it didn't like the extra monitors and dock and I wasted several hours trying to stop the graphics freezing up and Fusion not displaying anything of any obvious relevance.

Conclusions:

I used the same prompts given in the demo and after some further messing about, it went off and pretty much recreated the example board (a simple 12V > 5V buck regulator on a double sided board). However, I was unable to manipulate the 3D assembly and Claude had to spend a fair while buggering about trying to figure out why. No matter what I did, with restating Fusion, opening just the 3D PCB assembly etc I couldn't get the thing to pan, tilt, zoom etc. What a pile of crap Fusion Electronics is.

And along the way I had to mess about endlessly with crashed / frozen graphics, messing with display settings etc all to no avail. To be fair to Adom, the problems were almost certainly due to the Fusion Electronics element – the graphics issues persisted after disabling the Adom add-on and running on a single monitor. 

I’ve never used Eagle/Fusion, partly due to the scathing reviews. Apparently Kicad is more robust and is also supported by the Hydrogen bridge, so I will put this ridiculous Fusion Electronics fiasco behind me, several hours of my life I will never get back etc etc.

What next?

I’ll get Claude to install Kicad on my machine, along with the Adom app adom-jlcpcb that checks live stock levels at JLCPCB’s manufacturing partner (LCSC), so I know the parts they choose will be available: I want to be able to simply order the assembled PCBA. Then I’ll try again….

Background:

This whole product  seems to be a example of how all this AI technology could be used. As Claude responded:

The rapid-fire development speed you are seeing is because John Lauer has turned AI agents on his own codebase. He is essentially using the exact technology Adom is building for hardware engineering to build the software itself. Adom’s internal toolchain explicitly relies on a network of coordinated autonomous agents—like Claude Code, Codex, Kimi, and Antigravity—wired directly into their development environment, VS Code extensions, and terminal systems. How this AI-driven development pipeline works under the hood includes:

• Autonomous Coding & System Tweak: The agents aren't just giving autocomplete suggestions. They have permissions to actively open files, install extensions, execute workspace commands, run build scripts, and live-test the UI.
• The "One Human, Many Agents" Setup: Lauer acts more like an orchestrator or a "central broker" directing a swarm of AI threads. While his name is stamped on hundreds of recent commits and package updates across Adom's repositories, AI agents are writing vast swathes of the actual code under his direction. [1, 2, 3]
• AI Flow Tools: Adom even built a dedicated utility called adom-aiflow strictly to optimize how their custom AI agents navigate and build their software packages. 

It's a meta way to build a company: he is using a swarm of AI software agents to accelerate the development of an AI workbench (Hydrogen), which will eventually dictate how robotic workcells build physical hardware. He is practicing exactly what he preaches regarding "Shenzhen speed in the cloud".

If the CEO John Lauer’s name is vaguely familiar, it may be due to his previous work developing Chillipeppr which is a browser based g-code sender http://chilipeppr.com/tinyg And as Claude reported the myriad bugs to Adom’s swarm, updates were also being generated. I’m more used to software engineers working 9-5 (or possibly 10-6), whereas these agents are at it 24-7.

So, let's try again, this time with Kicad instead of Fusion and see if there's a cigar....