The author is missing the _hardest_ part of small hardware: power management.
The reason why AR glasses are not a thing yes is because there isn't a big enough battery to allow them to function for more than a few minutes.
Glasses form factor have space for about .9watt hours now, and ~2 in 4 years time (assuming current trends) Assuming a 14 hour day, that means that your have 140mwhr to spend every hour. A not very bright light on your glasses is about 30mw, a decently bright one is 90mw. Processing imagery on that kind of budget requires custom silicon, and a huge bunch of optimisations.
I don't think people have realized it yet, but AI can do hardware too. That's what I had hoped this was about.
I had Claude design an entire 4 layer rp2040 based PCB from scratch and PCBWay build it. It worked on the first go, other than some silkscreen overlapped, which doesn't hurt anything. That was before Fable.
Then I had it design a case for the new pcb to 3d print. Also worked the first go, but with minor cosmetic issues.
People have yet to even BEGIN to appreciate what these things can do with the right harness.
Witness. I've built three small projects from idea to pilot runs with Ai. Some parts of the process I had some solid experience with, and other parts I was holding the hand of my Ai and hoping he was sober and benevolent. I often had laughing fits of glee when things worked AND I understood them. As good as Ai is at just doing stuff, it's better at explaining and teaching. The back and forth made all the projects better, cheaper, tougher, and ultimately more usable.
For circuits then can be simulated. They have a of constraints that might make the problem space a lot smaller. Maybe there are also a lot of text on what makes a good design.
I also believe most design related to a physical object have documentation justifying the choices.
A lot of human PCB errors could be caught by analyzing the netlist against requirements and knowledge of the datasheet. Schematic and board formats are usually plaintext, so you can generate those directly even. Or kicad + python?
That’s probably enough for an LLM to check if you’ve mis-wired something, missed a part or chose the wrong resistor to set a regulator voltage. Plus good old DRC/ERC. If you pass all of those, there’s a good chance things will work unless your placement is really bad, but you could manually lay out and autoroute a lot of simple boards. Not to belittle the parent but a 4 layer board is actually simpler in some ways because you have a power plane which is one less net to worry about.
For analog work you can even run a SPICE simulation.
In so far as AI can do hardware reliably you can bet your bottom dollar the big chip fabs have already been doing that. They don’t call it AI though and the models aren’t language based, surprisingly enough /s
For small stuff, sure. For something with more components I don't think it's ever gonna be useful. Routing a pcb is an np-hard problem and, imho, no AI has enough actual thinking capability to make a good job out of it.
The human brain hasn't solved NP-hardness, either. We make it work using heuristics and automation tools, which in turn use heuristics themselves. I see no reason why AI wouldn't be able to take the same approach.
I mean we already have seen this happen with AlphaDev. Not sure why AI would fail at working on NP-hard problems if our current way is to basically guess and keep trying until something clicks (something that is not difficult for an AI system that can just keep running).
What confidence would you have in AI's ability to do 20-40GHz signal routing with good integrity? HDMI + USB4 + USB-C DP AltMode and a bunch of USB4 routing/switching fabric stuff?
Hook it up so it can experiment away by itself with tools, provide a end goal and ask it to iterate until it reached it. What the "AI can do vs not" becomes more about how long you can let it do inference in such loop, with local hardware it gets really cheap (granted you have the hardware already), with remote inference cost is probably the limiter.
While personalization is definitely the trend, I don't think people are going to build code just to personalize. A tiny few of all who bought the device could do that. A few more could flash the device with some open firmware that gives more features and personalization and most will stick with the range of the personalization provided by the vendor.
For the most people, the risks outweigh the desire for tinkering. Personalization will grow right at the vendor offering, not in the hands of customer. People don't even have the time to cook their own recipes. People have their own chores to worry about. I'm talking about bulk of the customer base, not the geeks.
I've been programming computers and tinkering with all sorts of hardware for more than 30 years. I first used FreeBSD in.....2001? and Linux not long after that. I've programmed OS code, I've grudgingly written VHDL, I've assembled a sound card for the Apple II I still have running - all this to say that I believe I'm in your tiny few.
And I'm so tired. Tired of having to debug all the things. Tired of having to pay attention to them. Tired of setting them up "just once" and then months later having to reverse engineer my own work because something failed.
So I don't. I leave nearly all my devices stock. I run Windows because I'm sick of debugging device driver issues. And I don't want personalized hardware with any electronics in it (bespoke wooden objects, those I love and make).
> I run Windows because I'm sick of debugging device driver issues.
Lost me there. The rest is reasonable but other OSes (MacOS, Linux) also rarely have driver issues. Its not like Windows never needs fixing (these days more than Linux). These days you can buy computers with Linux pre-installed and compatible hardware.
My biggest problem with technology is with very stock stuff. Mobile apps that everyone pushes you to use that clutter up your phone and are often crap. Every time an app I use updates I wonder "what have they broken this time?".
I get where you're coming from, though I'm not quite at 30 years yet. I like building stuff, I don't like configuring, debugging or troubleshooting my OS or computer. I just want it to work and get out of the way.
For me this has translated into a slightly different outcome: stock ubuntu with basically just zsh/powerlevel10k, I add component assembly when I buy a new desktop, I'm about to probably replace my home server with a NAS etc.
> Personalization will grow right at the vendor offering
I think so. There will be a short period, like now, where many will attempt to build their own products and the five good ideas out of five thousand will be incorporated into products built by those who know what they’re doing.
An absolutely technophobic friend asked me what agentic AI was today. I think Charlie Munger said “When even your barber is talking about it, sell and run”
The keyboard enthusiasts got to "personalized hardware" pretty early, so there might be some lessons there.
There's a whole continuum from "Buy an off the shelf unit" to "here's a barebones case you can slide ready made switches and caps into" to "mix and match custom PCBs and cases" to designing your own PCBs and/or cases. There are pretty clear pipelines and even some levels of tooling for "draw up the layout you want and get a bunch of files you can send to production houses"
Takeaway 1: A lot of this is grounded in economic realities. I did the full bespoke route (custom PCB, custom 3-D printed case) and figured it probably cost me about $500 all inclusive to get what I wanted, and that's honestly a lot of money for a keyboard.
AI won't solve any of the economic problems. They can't fix "the minimum PCB order is N units, so now you have a drawer full of spares you paid for". They can't make the expensive part you needed cheaper, especially if you're an individual buying quantity of 1/5/10 instead of an OEM buying reels and containers-full. They can't change the fact that a case for a large widget will be expensive to mill/3-D print/mould/etc.
Takeaway 2: Customers may have surprisingly limited imagination for bespoke gear. There are galleries (and even coffee-table books) full of exotic keyboards. But Micro Center is full of $50 interchangeable "tenkeyless with RGB lighting" boards; throwing on a random set of "custom" keycaps, and that's enough for a large part of the audience.
Will these customers want or benefit from more tools, or will it just give them rope to hang themselves on and give them an excuse to bail out of the purchase entirely? Even if you can provide them a gallery of vetted turnkey choices, there might be more choice paralysis than actual benefit.
Takeaway 3: Hardware is forever (relative to software). You have a lot of small firms and group-buy products that disappeared and now the owners can't get an exact replacement or repairs. Conversely, Unicomp can gut and rebuild a 1986 Model M with new innards in large part because they've been selling the same basic design since a 386DX/16 cost as much as a Toyota Tercel.
If your AI spawns a galaxy of 1-of-1 bespoke products, who services and supports them? That seems like it's only going to appeal to the enthusiast-hacker type who can keep them alive themselves, who is least likely to need AI help designing them. Design for disposability isn't a great look for anything but incredibly low-cost, limited-usecase items.
I won't submit to data sniffing from corporation,
so "personalized" hardware won't make it into this
area here.
By the way, this is not new either. In the 1990s
Microsoft tried to convince people how great it is
if their fridge gives data to MS so MS can order
needed food etc..
Fast forward some decades - many don't want to yield
any more data to private entities, no matter which
alleged "benefit" this would bring.
If you are keeping inside the LEGO level of complexity, almost. But just as with code, if the project is complex you need a real engineer herding the cats. That said, it certainly can extend the reach of an effort, and is a huge help doing board reviews and data sheet analysis, etc. but the real engineering decisions are very very hit and miss, just like with code.
> Here's the catch. To put a decent interface on a seven-dollar board today, you still need C++, a board SDK... None of that looks anything like building for the web, so the way most people build interfaces stops at the edge of the device.
I’ve had Claude build UIs from scratch in rust. No framework. I prompted it to make its own ImGUI style Ui system and a few minutes later I had texts, icons, buttons, sliders, scrolling lists, etc..
All my experience tells me it can do it with or without a GPU meaning if you don’t have one it can easily write a software render for a UI
Here is the author of Gea Stack. There is no browser in the device, none of these devices could run one with 512KB of RAM (+2-8MB of PSRAM). We instead transpile TypeScript and CSS into native code, so the UI you build with web technologies look and behave identical on a microcontroller.
This reminds me of the other article posted on here, https://isene.org/2026/05/Audience-of-One.html Everyday more bespoke dotfiles are coming online for an audience of one. I am not surprised that this is coming to hardware as well.
AI + hardware has really helped my wife and I get more sleep.
I had an esp32-box-3 lying around from a lapsed "voice agent" project from a year or two ago. Had a baby. Baby moved to another room, sleep trained. Baby either: 1. wakes up a few times a night, babbles for a bit, goes back to sleep OR 2. baby wakes up and fusses for N (=10) minutes, at which point parents need to go in and settle (that's the sleep training routine we use).
In either case, we do NOT want to wake up every time the baby does. Baby can go back to sleep easily, we adults have a harder time. A few rounds with Claude and the esp32 is now our new baby monitor. It tracks cry/fuss duration and publishes an audio stream (via a web UI or direct with, say, VLC). The audio only comes through AFTER N minutes of fussing have elapsed. It also posts notifications (to ntfy) after 30s and N minutes. My log says baby often wakes up 1-2 times a night and resettles almost immediately. We only wake up if the audio comes through, after N (10) minutes.
Also during the day it's really handy to be notified when baby has woken up from her nap. Let's us be out of the house, or in a distant room, and still keep track of what's going on.
It's fun to keep improving and adding features to this. Never would have had the time/energy to get this done without a coding agent. I ordered a set of 10 more of the esp32-box-3s to give them out to my friends (well, some are for other projects... so much potential).
(EDIT: Yes, I know this isn't AI designing hardware, but even writing code for embedded off the shelf stuff feels like a huge new potential.)
This is one of the killer use cases of AI, build personalized stuff for your life, that no company does. It is kind of generalized „intelligent stuff“ that one can use. Like minecraft your life
And it's probably going the same way all the personalized software we've been seeing: used as a spam "I built this" post on reddit or hacker news and to never be touched again.
With hardware you get extra safety risks of fires and shocks, so let's see
I do agree that hardware gap starts to shrink, similarly to what Software gap once used to be. It is much easier to avoid spending time loading the right drivers and looking up what error message on that tiny device you are working on means. Especially if AI could run in terminal itself.
I tried building a health device few years ago and got completely lost in how to setup camera and touch display with a raspberry PI. Would imagine, with AI running in a command line, it would be much easier.
All the people that I know in tech and not in tech, don't do that, even if presented with the option they're too busy to also get into this endeavour that still requires a lot of expertise. I stopped reading there
No, by reasonable definitions that's doable too. My phone runs an OS I chose, that I have admin access on, that runs any app I tell it to run. And, y'know, it's my property that I bought with my own money, but that's probably aside your argument.
Ehhh, maybe? I haven't heard many people wishing for devices that were within the realm of practicality (I.E. not a flying car). If someone has an actual good idea, then the cost of the components and tools and rework is the next major hurdle (soldering by hand is where cool ideas go to die). Meanwhile a commercial off-the-shelf device probably works good enough.
The author is missing the _hardest_ part of small hardware: power management.
The reason why AR glasses are not a thing yes is because there isn't a big enough battery to allow them to function for more than a few minutes.
Glasses form factor have space for about .9watt hours now, and ~2 in 4 years time (assuming current trends) Assuming a 14 hour day, that means that your have 140mwhr to spend every hour. A not very bright light on your glasses is about 30mw, a decently bright one is 90mw. Processing imagery on that kind of budget requires custom silicon, and a huge bunch of optimisations.
I don't think people have realized it yet, but AI can do hardware too. That's what I had hoped this was about.
I had Claude design an entire 4 layer rp2040 based PCB from scratch and PCBWay build it. It worked on the first go, other than some silkscreen overlapped, which doesn't hurt anything. That was before Fable.
Then I had it design a case for the new pcb to 3d print. Also worked the first go, but with minor cosmetic issues.
People have yet to even BEGIN to appreciate what these things can do with the right harness.
Witness. I've built three small projects from idea to pilot runs with Ai. Some parts of the process I had some solid experience with, and other parts I was holding the hand of my Ai and hoping he was sober and benevolent. I often had laughing fits of glee when things worked AND I understood them. As good as Ai is at just doing stuff, it's better at explaining and teaching. The back and forth made all the projects better, cheaper, tougher, and ultimately more usable.
What harness have you been using for EDA/CAD stuff?
Im surprised by how bad LLMs are with SVGs but somehow are oke-ish with CAD and other weird files.
For circuits then can be simulated. They have a of constraints that might make the problem space a lot smaller. Maybe there are also a lot of text on what makes a good design.
I also believe most design related to a physical object have documentation justifying the choices.
What do you to get the case? I use build123d with Python and the results are pretty good!
My attempt at VHDL was a failure but at least it helped me to get a modern build on a Sockit.
But that was a few months ago, getting high hope with fable and seeing killed before I could even try it for that project killed all my motivations.
That's mildly surprising to me, given what I've seen when I ask current models to make an SVG of something.
Would I be on the right track if I guessed there's a DSL for designing PCBs that would help enforce functional correctness?
A lot of human PCB errors could be caught by analyzing the netlist against requirements and knowledge of the datasheet. Schematic and board formats are usually plaintext, so you can generate those directly even. Or kicad + python?
That’s probably enough for an LLM to check if you’ve mis-wired something, missed a part or chose the wrong resistor to set a regulator voltage. Plus good old DRC/ERC. If you pass all of those, there’s a good chance things will work unless your placement is really bad, but you could manually lay out and autoroute a lot of simple boards. Not to belittle the parent but a 4 layer board is actually simpler in some ways because you have a power plane which is one less net to worry about.
For analog work you can even run a SPICE simulation.
In so far as AI can do hardware reliably you can bet your bottom dollar the big chip fabs have already been doing that. They don’t call it AI though and the models aren’t language based, surprisingly enough /s
For small stuff, sure. For something with more components I don't think it's ever gonna be useful. Routing a pcb is an np-hard problem and, imho, no AI has enough actual thinking capability to make a good job out of it.
The human brain hasn't solved NP-hardness, either. We make it work using heuristics and automation tools, which in turn use heuristics themselves. I see no reason why AI wouldn't be able to take the same approach.
I mean we already have seen this happen with AlphaDev. Not sure why AI would fail at working on NP-hard problems if our current way is to basically guess and keep trying until something clicks (something that is not difficult for an AI system that can just keep running).
> Then I had it design a case for the new pcb to 3d print.
Can you elaborate on this? What did you use to "design" it?
Im thinking of getting a 3d printer and would love to explore this intersection a bit more.
What confidence would you have in AI's ability to do 20-40GHz signal routing with good integrity? HDMI + USB4 + USB-C DP AltMode and a bunch of USB4 routing/switching fabric stuff?
Hook it up so it can experiment away by itself with tools, provide a end goal and ask it to iterate until it reached it. What the "AI can do vs not" becomes more about how long you can let it do inference in such loop, with local hardware it gets really cheap (granted you have the hardware already), with remote inference cost is probably the limiter.
While personalization is definitely the trend, I don't think people are going to build code just to personalize. A tiny few of all who bought the device could do that. A few more could flash the device with some open firmware that gives more features and personalization and most will stick with the range of the personalization provided by the vendor.
For the most people, the risks outweigh the desire for tinkering. Personalization will grow right at the vendor offering, not in the hands of customer. People don't even have the time to cook their own recipes. People have their own chores to worry about. I'm talking about bulk of the customer base, not the geeks.
I'd include the geeks in that.
I've been programming computers and tinkering with all sorts of hardware for more than 30 years. I first used FreeBSD in.....2001? and Linux not long after that. I've programmed OS code, I've grudgingly written VHDL, I've assembled a sound card for the Apple II I still have running - all this to say that I believe I'm in your tiny few.
And I'm so tired. Tired of having to debug all the things. Tired of having to pay attention to them. Tired of setting them up "just once" and then months later having to reverse engineer my own work because something failed.
So I don't. I leave nearly all my devices stock. I run Windows because I'm sick of debugging device driver issues. And I don't want personalized hardware with any electronics in it (bespoke wooden objects, those I love and make).
> I run Windows because I'm sick of debugging device driver issues.
Lost me there. The rest is reasonable but other OSes (MacOS, Linux) also rarely have driver issues. Its not like Windows never needs fixing (these days more than Linux). These days you can buy computers with Linux pre-installed and compatible hardware.
My biggest problem with technology is with very stock stuff. Mobile apps that everyone pushes you to use that clutter up your phone and are often crap. Every time an app I use updates I wonder "what have they broken this time?".
I get where you're coming from, though I'm not quite at 30 years yet. I like building stuff, I don't like configuring, debugging or troubleshooting my OS or computer. I just want it to work and get out of the way.
For me this has translated into a slightly different outcome: stock ubuntu with basically just zsh/powerlevel10k, I add component assembly when I buy a new desktop, I'm about to probably replace my home server with a NAS etc.
> Personalization will grow right at the vendor offering
I think so. There will be a short period, like now, where many will attempt to build their own products and the five good ideas out of five thousand will be incorporated into products built by those who know what they’re doing.
An absolutely technophobic friend asked me what agentic AI was today. I think Charlie Munger said “When even your barber is talking about it, sell and run”
The keyboard enthusiasts got to "personalized hardware" pretty early, so there might be some lessons there.
There's a whole continuum from "Buy an off the shelf unit" to "here's a barebones case you can slide ready made switches and caps into" to "mix and match custom PCBs and cases" to designing your own PCBs and/or cases. There are pretty clear pipelines and even some levels of tooling for "draw up the layout you want and get a bunch of files you can send to production houses"
Takeaway 1: A lot of this is grounded in economic realities. I did the full bespoke route (custom PCB, custom 3-D printed case) and figured it probably cost me about $500 all inclusive to get what I wanted, and that's honestly a lot of money for a keyboard.
AI won't solve any of the economic problems. They can't fix "the minimum PCB order is N units, so now you have a drawer full of spares you paid for". They can't make the expensive part you needed cheaper, especially if you're an individual buying quantity of 1/5/10 instead of an OEM buying reels and containers-full. They can't change the fact that a case for a large widget will be expensive to mill/3-D print/mould/etc.
Takeaway 2: Customers may have surprisingly limited imagination for bespoke gear. There are galleries (and even coffee-table books) full of exotic keyboards. But Micro Center is full of $50 interchangeable "tenkeyless with RGB lighting" boards; throwing on a random set of "custom" keycaps, and that's enough for a large part of the audience.
Will these customers want or benefit from more tools, or will it just give them rope to hang themselves on and give them an excuse to bail out of the purchase entirely? Even if you can provide them a gallery of vetted turnkey choices, there might be more choice paralysis than actual benefit.
Takeaway 3: Hardware is forever (relative to software). You have a lot of small firms and group-buy products that disappeared and now the owners can't get an exact replacement or repairs. Conversely, Unicomp can gut and rebuild a 1986 Model M with new innards in large part because they've been selling the same basic design since a 386DX/16 cost as much as a Toyota Tercel.
If your AI spawns a galaxy of 1-of-1 bespoke products, who services and supports them? That seems like it's only going to appeal to the enthusiast-hacker type who can keep them alive themselves, who is least likely to need AI help designing them. Design for disposability isn't a great look for anything but incredibly low-cost, limited-usecase items.
I won't submit to data sniffing from corporation, so "personalized" hardware won't make it into this area here.
By the way, this is not new either. In the 1990s Microsoft tried to convince people how great it is if their fridge gives data to MS so MS can order needed food etc..
Fast forward some decades - many don't want to yield any more data to private entities, no matter which alleged "benefit" this would bring.
Mmmmmmmmmm… sort of.
If you are keeping inside the LEGO level of complexity, almost. But just as with code, if the project is complex you need a real engineer herding the cats. That said, it certainly can extend the reach of an effort, and is a huge help doing board reviews and data sheet analysis, etc. but the real engineering decisions are very very hit and miss, just like with code.
> Here's the catch. To put a decent interface on a seven-dollar board today, you still need C++, a board SDK... None of that looks anything like building for the web, so the way most people build interfaces stops at the edge of the device.
So they put a web browser in the device?
I’ve had Claude build UIs from scratch in rust. No framework. I prompted it to make its own ImGUI style Ui system and a few minutes later I had texts, icons, buttons, sliders, scrolling lists, etc..
All my experience tells me it can do it with or without a GPU meaning if you don’t have one it can easily write a software render for a UI
Here is the author of Gea Stack. There is no browser in the device, none of these devices could run one with 512KB of RAM (+2-8MB of PSRAM). We instead transpile TypeScript and CSS into native code, so the UI you build with web technologies look and behave identical on a microcontroller.
This reminds me of the other article posted on here, https://isene.org/2026/05/Audience-of-One.html Everyday more bespoke dotfiles are coming online for an audience of one. I am not surprised that this is coming to hardware as well.
AI + hardware has really helped my wife and I get more sleep.
I had an esp32-box-3 lying around from a lapsed "voice agent" project from a year or two ago. Had a baby. Baby moved to another room, sleep trained. Baby either: 1. wakes up a few times a night, babbles for a bit, goes back to sleep OR 2. baby wakes up and fusses for N (=10) minutes, at which point parents need to go in and settle (that's the sleep training routine we use).
In either case, we do NOT want to wake up every time the baby does. Baby can go back to sleep easily, we adults have a harder time. A few rounds with Claude and the esp32 is now our new baby monitor. It tracks cry/fuss duration and publishes an audio stream (via a web UI or direct with, say, VLC). The audio only comes through AFTER N minutes of fussing have elapsed. It also posts notifications (to ntfy) after 30s and N minutes. My log says baby often wakes up 1-2 times a night and resettles almost immediately. We only wake up if the audio comes through, after N (10) minutes.
Also during the day it's really handy to be notified when baby has woken up from her nap. Let's us be out of the house, or in a distant room, and still keep track of what's going on.
It's fun to keep improving and adding features to this. Never would have had the time/energy to get this done without a coding agent. I ordered a set of 10 more of the esp32-box-3s to give them out to my friends (well, some are for other projects... so much potential).
(EDIT: Yes, I know this isn't AI designing hardware, but even writing code for embedded off the shelf stuff feels like a huge new potential.)
This is one of the killer use cases of AI, build personalized stuff for your life, that no company does. It is kind of generalized „intelligent stuff“ that one can use. Like minecraft your life
This actually feels like something that could be a popular app on a baby monitor.
And it's probably going the same way all the personalized software we've been seeing: used as a spam "I built this" post on reddit or hacker news and to never be touched again.
With hardware you get extra safety risks of fires and shocks, so let's see
With hardware/computers becoming locked, thin clients and unaffordable we're already forced to customize our devices cyber punk style.
You're lucky if you're in a region where these open-hardware companies sell their wares, even though many of them will go under in the current market.
I do agree that hardware gap starts to shrink, similarly to what Software gap once used to be. It is much easier to avoid spending time loading the right drivers and looking up what error message on that tiny device you are working on means. Especially if AI could run in terminal itself.
I tried building a health device few years ago and got completely lost in how to setup camera and touch display with a raspberry PI. Would imagine, with AI running in a command line, it would be much easier.
I love the slider UI element to switch between different examples on their landing page (https://geastack.com/)... not sure if satire or real.
It is real :)
> People build their own applications now
All the people that I know in tech and not in tech, don't do that, even if presented with the option they're too busy to also get into this endeavour that still requires a lot of expertise. I stopped reading there
"So the interesting question isn't whether personal hardware is coming. It's who gets to write the software that runs on it."
It's not that I don't like your point of view. It's that I can't stand AI slop.
well my phone can do almost everything
anything but be owned by you
No, by reasonable definitions that's doable too. My phone runs an OS I chose, that I have admin access on, that runs any app I tell it to run. And, y'know, it's my property that I bought with my own money, but that's probably aside your argument.
One can say that he chose iOS by buying iPhone. I don't see any strong argument here
Ehhh, maybe? I haven't heard many people wishing for devices that were within the realm of practicality (I.E. not a flying car). If someone has an actual good idea, then the cost of the components and tools and rework is the next major hurdle (soldering by hand is where cool ideas go to die). Meanwhile a commercial off-the-shelf device probably works good enough.