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(somewhat) unrelated to this kerfuffle, but I can say I've ordered thousands of dollars of stuff from Adafruit, and the quality of the electronics, the speed of shipping, the prices, and the customer service have been consistently outstanding.

Hope common sense prevails and Adafruit can go back to doing what it does best instead of dealing with this (IMO) distraction.

Good luck! Big fan of your work for many, many years. Thank you for the amazing resource that is Adafruit.

This is exactly my experience, wasted $60 trying to get it to make something. The founder sent an automated AI email about setting up a time to meet and go through it then ghosted me at the meeting time.

> There are some AI-driven autorouters out there now. Placement is probably the big issue that needs to be solved now.

Interesting that within an IC this is basically "solved", or at least properly automated with classical numeric techniques such as simulated annealing.

I would have thought there's a big opportunity in a mixed-technique approach, where you use AI to extract unstructured data from datasheets and then feed it into more deterministic tools.

I also note that it's very easy to waste more than $100 in electronics once you start actually manufacturing bad PCBs.

> After about 50-100$ in tokens a couple of times, I couldn't get more than a couple of simple components on the schematic.

Is this common? When I try out new AI tools, even as person who is financially independent, I load up maybe 10-20 USD worth of tokens, and if I don't get anything working from that, I literally give up and don't continue trying. If it can't do anything useful like "place a simple component on the schematic" after ~10 USD of expenditure, is it really worth continue adding more money into the platform? Seems DOA in those cases.

I tried this last week and had the same experience. It was terrible and they got $140 out of me before I realized what it was (not) capable of. Their support was nonexistent as well.

> I could only get about 80% of what I wanted together with my hacky workflow.

I literally did this yesterday with solid results using Codex CLI. I used xhigh thinking and gpt 5.5.

I had it use KiCad directly via cli rather than via MCP, and I did make Claude Opus review it's work after every round. I got what I think will be a working revision A in about 10 hours of tinkering spread over a few days.

> Placement is probably the big issue that needs to be solved now.

Would some sort of constraint-solving algorithm help with that? Something like (but not necessarily) Cassowary[0]? Maybe I'm misunderstanding what is meant by placement though; I don't have much domain knowledge in PCBs / electronics.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43362528

That's more money I have paid for (real) software (that are not games) in my entire life.

Yeah this stuff isn't even realistic as well.

A number of years ago I was working on something professionally and there was a problem. Only about 1 in 5 boards assembled wouldn't crash the CPU. After much debugging it turned out one of the ICs had an open collector output and it wasn't loaded correctly with a pull up resistor. This caused a cascading failure, held the bus up when initialising the hardware which hit the WDT and reset the CPU over and over again.

If you aren't there designing the thing in the first place, you never read the datasheets, never drew the schematic, never placed the components and thus don't know where to look when something goes wrong. And it does go wrong. And then you're in deep shit.

I worry about people who think they can get a product out of the door with this stuff but can't.

There's a lesson in here about how to name your product, but I can't quite flux my finger on it

Also not related to https://fluxkeyboard.com/

> Time to shine

Nor is this Flux the display warmth app

Thanks, that name was indeed making me wonder what's going on with the BFL people. :)

Streisand in full effect!

It might be being suggested in that statement, but to me that reads that there's a potential opportunity there for a delayed AMA on this?

That if people were to email [email protected] with a subject line (for example) of 'FLUX - AMA for later', these questions could be rounded up and the responses could then go onto a Adafruit blog page later, when and if applicable?

I'm curious, but I'm not sure if you can say - has Adafruit ever published anything about Flux?

Can we see the content of the demand letter? It should have been linked to your post. It's difficult for us to evaluate the merits of their allegations otherwise.

A flawed product is forgivable. A SLAPP means permanent corporate exile. You lose Flux.ai.

Yea I had no idea this product exists but it seems to be pretty horrible from the experiences shared in this thread

Seems similar to what Microsoft is doing lately:

https://www.cpomagazine.com/cyber-security/microsoft-doubles...

That's actually very common even with respected bug bounty programs. Communicating exploits to anyone else (let alone the general public) will at the very least make you ineligible for rewards.

what about if I knock on the door (send an http request), and someone comes to it and hands me a bunch of documents (sends an http response with data).

It often does when your front door is otherwise a business storefront. Without knowing the specifics of what was accessed, analogies really aren't helpful. And there seems to be zero context here, so this strikes me as the most plausible scenario: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48368635

(I agree that Adafruit's statement itself is worded pretty terribly!)

That isn’t legal in most jurisdictions either. You’re not a lawyer.

It seems there's suspiciously little context available, yet here I also am commenting on a 'vaguepost'. I wonder if one day AI will be able to filter out vagueposts from my browser along with ragebait and curiosity gap headlines.

Best I can tell they've taken down whatever it was, but most likely flux left some ways to get data out of their system that shouldn't have been and Adafruit leveraged that. Could have been in a good way like exposing false claims of architecture or security, or a bad way like revealing proprietary information on how the platform worked or looking at other peoples' projects (more than just seeing they could do that). If the blog doesn't come back up, I'll kinda assume they did something bad. I don't have sources but I've heard adafruit isn't the sweetest fruit in the tree...

Yep, and it’s terrible

Not only did it burn a 100$ failing but it did so in a very untransparent way.

I bought a 20 dollar plan but they snuck a 100$ billed usage into the billing agreements next thing I know the agent as used the quote going in circles and my card is billed.

I suspect they don't care. Their only goal is likely to get enough good PR to sell to some big tech or AI company for an absurd valuation.

They vibe coded their system and it showed Adafruit something? Or showed some information with trivial prodding? Sounds like your average cross-tenant leak. Maybe showing more than intended or some caching issue. Many options some not really not fault of Adafruit.