April 16, 2026
Hold my probe
Show HN: Spice simulation → oscilloscope → verification with Claude Code
AI builds and tests real circuits live—fans hype it, vets warn 'trust the scope'
TLDR: A maker let an AI design and test real circuits by connecting it to a simulator and oscilloscope, making hardware work faster and less guessy. The community splits between hype for data-driven automation and warnings about AI hallucinations, pushing for strict guardrails like clean files, pin maps, and manual checks.
An indie hardware tinkerer wired up Claude Code to a circuit simulator, a real oscilloscope, and a simple build script so the AI can design, measure, and verify electronics like a tiny lab assistant. The demo is basic on purpose, but the crowd reaction? Not basic at all. One camp is chanting “closed loop or bust,” cheering that real measurements finally replace vibes-based engineering. “Very cool idea,” says one fan, asking if it’s reliable enough to run test after test without babysitting.
Then the drama drops. A burned commenter warns that Claude once hallucinated features and declared a “billion-dollar” breakthrough—none of the boards worked. Another veteran says they had to feed the AI clean, simplified data because it “invented pin numbers.” The original post backs them up with hard rules: don’t let the bot guess your wiring, keep data fresh, save raw readings to files, give clear pin maps, and use a simple build/flash command so it can’t go rogue. Pragmatists offer hacks: use Mermaid diagrams to describe circuits; one experimenter even lets the model “reconfigure the circuit on the fly.” The moral? AI is strong with a scope in hand—but the community won’t stop side‑eyeing until the readings speak.
Key Points
- •Initial approach of prompting Claude Code to design circuits worked for trivial cases but not for complex designs.
- •Connecting Claude Code to an oscilloscope and a SPICE simulator provided immediate feedback and improved validation.
- •The setup streamlined validation of SPICE circuits/models, embedded programming, and data analysis tasks.
- •Operational guidance: avoid stale measurements, don’t guess wiring, and interact with data via files rather than raw dumps.
- •Provide explicit MCU pinout/pinmux and a Makefile with standard targets so Claude uses reliable commands.