Adafruit receives demand letter from Fenwick legal counsel on behalf of Flux.ai

https://blog.adafruit.com/

by semanser • 2 months ago

684 275 2 months ago

blog.adafruit.com

kasabali• 2 months ago

What's the context here?

Neil44• 2 months ago

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.

abirch• 2 months ago

If AI does that it’ll make us 10x readers

throw_a_grenade• 2 months ago

It's deliberately written that way, by lawyers who are making sure they (Adafruit) won't accidentaly admit to something they didn't.

somewhatgoated5• 2 months ago

Idk now that there are bunch of comments on the thread it’s vastly more interesting.

mblackstone• 2 months ago

I wonder if one day AI will be able to filter out advertisements from my browser.

Neywiny• 2 months ago

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...

mijoharas• 2 months ago

My guess is that Adafruit tried flux.ai, noticed a server misconfiguration, contacted flux about it, and then received a cease and desist to prevent them disclosing the vulnerability publicly.

(AFAICT they haven't published anything yet? If they have it's been taken down).

There's a definite bit of Streisand effect here because I for one am very much looking forward to finding out what the deal is.

throwa356262• 2 months ago

Had no idea about this. Now I do.

Thank you, lawyers. If you ever find yourself out of work use this as your reference to pivot to advertisement

jamesbfb• 2 months ago

Streisand in full effect!

bayindirh• 2 months ago

It's super effective!

mjd• 2 months ago

Same, I'd never heard of this product or company before, and know I know how many people on HN say they tried it and said it didn't work!

antirez• 2 months ago

Note that this is not related to Black Forest Labs Flux, the image synthesis models builders, and is instead related to a PCB AI authoring product called Flux.ai.

justinclift2• 2 months ago

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

suncemoje• 2 months ago

Exactly, these vectors point in very different directions!

Trung0246• 2 months ago

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

xd1936• 2 months ago

Nor f.lux, the warm light software that got Sherlocked by every major OS.

https://justgetflux.com/

villgax• 2 months ago

Time to shine

Nor is this Flux the display warmth app

baobabKoodaa• 2 months ago

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

fintler• 2 months ago

Don't forget about the (awesome) cluster scheduler, Flux.

https://hpc-tutorials.llnl.gov/flux/

rboyd• 2 months ago

also unrelated to a private repo I have in my github named flux

luma• 2 months ago

Flux.ai offers a PCB design solution which is a clear interest for Adafruit. Anyone have any idea what this is about?

barnas2• 2 months ago

Flux.ai offers a PCB design solution

"solution" is an interesting choice. I haven't talked to anyone who tried it and actually got anything useful. It completely failed when I tried using it.

tecleandor• 2 months ago

Flux just got funding from Bain and others, and it feels like Adafruit was preparing a post about it. Maybe they contacted Flux to confirm some info and they freaked out?

I can't find in archive.org if they had a previous post about it.

Also, seems like there a good bunch of complains in Reddit about Flux and its billing...

https://old.reddit.com/r/PCB/comments/1t476x4/warning_fluxai...

karmicthreat2• 2 months ago

Adafruit probably did a review of AI PCB tools. I've used Flux.ai before; it was a pretty bad experience. After about 50-100$ in tokens a couple of times, I couldn't get more than a couple of simple components on the schematic. And not in sensible positions.

The product just grinds tokens for little return, in my opinion. I had far better luck wiring together KiCad MCP, SKIDL. There are some AI-driven autorouters out there now. Placement is probably the big issue that needs to be solved now. I could only get about 80% of what I wanted together with my hacky workflow.

embedding-shape• 2 months ago

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.

karmicthreat2• 2 months ago

I used company money on it. I was hoping I could massage it along enough to get a workable test fixture out of it. I wanted to put together a simple hardware-in-the-loop tester for a component of our product.

phs318u• 2 months ago

Someone should’ve told these guys: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48337328

StephenSmith• 2 months ago

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.

moron4hire5• 2 months ago

All of these Gen AI tools where you pay a subscription fee are basically Software-as-a-Casino. You spin the wheel and hope it doesn't come up 00, then chase good money after bad when it does. Add in the parasocial relationship that some people develop with the LLM and you basically have OnlyFans but instead of vaguely dissatisfying feet pics to order it's vaguely dissatisfying code to order. It's that edge of "almost there, just one more token, bro" that makes it addictive.

mapontosevenths• 2 months ago

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.

nathanielks• 2 months ago

Is 10 hours a short amount of time for designing a PCB?

pjc503• 2 months ago

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.

doubled112• 2 months ago

mixed-technique approach

I think my biggest annoyance with the way we rolled out AI is that nobody seemed to want to use it to augment already working solutions.

Just throw everything out and have an LLM do it instead.

CorrectHorseBat• 2 months ago

It is far from solved in IC, synthesis tools sometimes still do really stupid things and there's still quite a lot of hand-holding required to get to a working chip.

PaulHoule2• 2 months ago

Until a few years ago it was generally understood that useful "creativity" involves solving problems within constraints, e.g. something a lot like SAT or SMT in spirit even if not in the details.

Then we got LLMs which will make a good parody of anything and occasionally get it right.

kevin_thibedeau3• 2 months ago

Within an IC you don't have large obstructions for metal layers, distances are short, and buffers can be inserted at will to manage SI.

monuszero2• 2 months ago

That precise mixed technique approach has worked well for me. I’ve been using JITX (python based circuit design with a powerful auto router). Free for personal use, and has been discussed a few times here in HN.

Edit: it’s almost assumed at this point but for completeness Claude / Codex were the ones driving the OO python code and datasheet research and parsing.

https://www.jitx.com/

ElFitz3• 2 months ago

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

lambdaone• 2 months ago

I've written my own autoplacer/autorouter. Placement is where you put the components on the board, routing is how you shape the traces to interconnect them.

It does a pretty decent job on small hobby-project boards of ~40 components (which is my use case at the moment), and I'm working part-time in the background on scaling it further.

The resulting designs pass all the KiCad electrical and geometry checks. Granted, I've spent about a year working on this problem, and it's hard, but not that hard a problem, providing you can avoid falling off the exponential cliff by decomposing it into hierarchical subproblems.

Quick-and-dirty unsupervised whole-board synthesis from schematic takes about 5 minutes, longer if you want cleaner output with nicer-looking better-routed traces.

As others here have said, placing is the real problem to solve, and that's where the magic happens. Place the components right, and routing is a relatively easy loosely-coupled constraint programming problem, place them wrongly, and you will have to get used to seeing the word UNFEASIBLE in your log output.

seveibar• 2 months ago

We work on this a lot at tscircuit, and we've used cassowary (i.e. flexbox-style) constraint solvers. The issue with cassowary/flexbox is PCBs are not as uniform as webpages w.r.t. alignment, and often have a much less nested structure (3 layers) vs web pages which have many many nested layers. CSS grid-style constraints are a much better fit IMO, but we eventually settled on sequential optimal packing[1] for "seeding" a placement so that AI can get initial positions before working in a feedback loop. I like sequential optimal packing because it's very very deterministic and the constraints are specified pretty close to how a human would specify them

[1] https://blog.autorouting.com/p/sequential-optimal-packing-fo...

inshane2• 2 months ago

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.

Barbing2• 2 months ago

But at least their priorities are in order. How do you overcome those showstopping challenges & have more time to meet customers?

Lawfare!

bartvk• 2 months ago

Yes but look, they set up meetings so they're listening to customers, like all good founders /s

emsign• 2 months ago

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

deweywsu• 2 months ago

Same for my experience.

jojobas• 2 months ago

Legal counsel typing intensifies.

inshane2• 2 months ago

As an electrical engineer who has tried to use it multiple times, I think Flux is an absolutely awful product. No surprise at all that they want to sweep details about their “intellectual property, commercial traction and user base” under the rug.

cryo323• 2 months ago

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.

SV_BubbleTime• 2 months ago

Everything you said is exactly the proper argument against vibe coding.

If you can’t or don’t entirely go over the output, the failure mode is invisible.

ACCount372• 2 months ago

In the pure software domain, this is solved by letting the AI own the entire loop. The AI writes the code, runs the code, tests the code, troubleshoots the code and fixes the code.

Embedded might be resistant to it, because software-hardware interactions are notoriously hard to sim, and AI still struggles with meatspace operations.

Not that it would stop anyone!

You say "people who think they can get a product out of the door with this stuff but can't" and I immediately think: Arduino. That was also seen as a way to introduce people who understand nothing about embedded to embedded. Surely no one would ever go from an Arduino prototype to an actual production run?

Ha ha WRONG. I've seen actual production hardware ship with Arduino firmware, because no one cared enough to fully rewrite that cobbled together Arduino firmware from the first prototype. The FW team just went over it enough to whack-a-mole the most obvious issues, and shipped the result.

So, no. People are absolutely going to ship AI genned embedded hardware, and get away with it too. I bet that by now, someone already did.

mindslight4• 2 months ago

I'm with you on the complexity of debugging hardware, as I've been there too. But I will say, automatically adding pullups to floating pins is something that an automated process could succeed at. Not first gen of blindly throwing an LLM at circuits and hoping, but perhaps a later improvement that uses metadata about parts. Perhaps curated metadata about parts, or always starting with a reference design and tweaking from there.

yodon• 2 months ago

Adafruit’s reporting concerns a matter of public security interest and was conducted in the ordinary course of responsible disclosure

wewewedxfgdf• 2 months ago

Suing the industry won't win them customers/friends.

bob001• 2 months ago

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.

TZubiri2• 2 months ago

The letter further asserts claims under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Adafruit accessed only information that Flux’s own systems made publicly available through a server misconfiguration

A confession

Ekaros2• 2 months ago

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.

TZubiri2• 2 months ago

I don't know the details of the case, but what they worded there is a textbook unauthorized intrusion and a naïve teenager "the door was open" defense.

Mind you there can be nuances, but that quote is like saying "I took their stuff, but it was poking out of their pocket."

myself248• 2 months ago

Or someone found server.domain/path/subdirectory/resourceX and was like "shit, I was hoping to find resourceY but I can't find a link to it, I wonder if I just click in my address bar and change the X to a Y", and voila, resourceY is right there.

To some of us, this is elementary navigation. Like going up the stairs if the elevator is out. Often it's faster than waiting for the damn elevator, too.

To others, it's cybarrrr-criiiimeeee!!!!!!11111one

raphman• 2 months ago

Never heard of Flux.ai before. It seems to be a 3D circuit designer with 'AI'.

Not sure what the issue between them and Adafruit is. However, people over on Reddit¹ claim that Flux.ai is a little bit scummy. They push users into a beginner trial ($5/month) and then silently charge for usage per token - up to $100 per month.

Oh, they also claim that they have "the world's largest community-driven public library of Adafruit products, including footprints, symbols, datasheets, and simulation models"². I wonder whether they designed these themselves or whether they use existing ones. Could not easily find licenses info.

¹) https://www.reddit.com/r/PCB/comments/18o5zfo/thoughts_on_fl...

²) https://www.flux.ai/sitemap/manufacturers/adafruit

gowld• 2 months ago

Flux.ai is abusing Adafruit's trademark while harassing Adafruit with a lawsuit. Wow!

dghlsakjg3• 2 months ago

Oh, they also claim that they have "the world's largest community-driven public library of Adafruit products, including footprints, symbols, datasheets, and simulation models"². I wonder whether they designed these themselves or whether they use existing ones. Could not easily find licenses info.

Their PCB designs are mostly CC Attribution-ShareAlike typically.

What's funny is that most Adafruit products aren't exactly secret. Most of them have open source schematics and PCB layouts. Even when they aren't, they pretty much just a reference design from a data sheet. The kind of people that have the competence to be using board design software could replicate their designs pretty easily.

0x592• 2 months ago

From what I can tell, the message is

When you discover an exploit, only communicate with source (and pray they respond) or get sued. Seems like the position is customers and stakeholders shouldn't be allowed access to this information.

sigmoid10• 2 months ago

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.

0x592• 2 months ago

IMO if you're participating in a BB program, you should abide by he rules set forth by the program.

If you're not, then you don't have to.

whstl• 2 months ago

Seems similar to what Microsoft is doing lately:

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

ptorrone3• 2 months ago

hi everyone, phil and limor here, any questions for now, email press@adafruit.com

limor and i are very much looking forward to telling our story.

zettabomb2• 2 months ago

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

jdnrebd• 2 months ago

You should read the linked article

boncester• 2 months ago

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 press@adafruit.com 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?

ptorrone3• 2 months ago

limor and phil here, we would 100% welcome it, looking forward to telling our story very soon - pt & limor

otterley6• 2 months ago

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.

reactordev2• 2 months ago

Struck a nerve, but I wouldn’t back down. If they do take you to court, there’s this wonderful thing called discovery.

Falimonda• 2 months ago

Had anyone tried AutoPCB (https://autopcb.app/) instead?

Seems especially useful when paired with an agentic coding tool!

pftburger• 2 months ago

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.

reactordev2• 2 months ago

We need outcome based billing...

I don't want to pay for a service that doesn't deliver.

trollbridge6• 2 months ago

I’m so sick of this that I go to the trouble to set up prepaid cards to pay for these things now.

A handful of honest participants like DeepSeek are pay as you go instead of trying to sneakily bill you for usage.

xbar• 2 months ago

Have you found anything that you like?

RagnarD• 2 months ago

Looks like Flux.ai got some publicity out of this. Maybe not the kind they wanted - after reading this thread, I'll sure never give them a dime.

somewhatgoated5• 2 months ago

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

kevin_thibedeau3• 2 months ago

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

Mr_Eri_Atlov• 2 months ago

I previously had a passing interest in Flux, now I'm certain it's a fraud.

mannanj• 2 months ago

Why do we tolerate this bullying and misconduct from companies that harms us and progress overall? Is there really no solution in this day and age for harmful behavior and aggression and hostility like what it looks like Flux is doing here? I can't believe we don't have an answer, I think it's just that the bad guys are drowning us in noise and making it hard for us to identify the solutions where we band together a la David v Goliath against them.

axegon_• 2 months ago

For anyone that has been missing the memo on how to become rich:

1. Make a slop machine that's a wrapper around another slop machine like claude, openai, google or whatever.

2. Hire a lawyer to send threatening emails to anyone that might call you out.

3. Get a few investors that are completely clueless to throw a ton of cash at you for having ai in your product.

4. Profit.

Honestly, get a hold of Louis Rossmann, this shit needs to stop.

pavel_lishin3• 2 months ago

Adafruit accessed only information that Flux’s own systems made publicly available through a server misconfiguration

Does anyone have some more context about what happened here? An uncharitable analogy might be that I misconfigured my front door by not locking it, which doesn't give someone the right to walk in and look around - but I have no idea what Adafruit is specifically being accused of doing.

UqWBcuFx6NV4r• 2 months ago

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

somewhatgoated5• 2 months ago

What isn’t legal? Cant really square your comment with GP comment.

pavel_lishin3• 2 months ago

That's rather my point.

And yep, I'm not a lawyer - and even if I were, I couldn't begin to speculate about this post because it says so little.

mindslight4• 2 months ago

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!)

dghlsakjg3• 2 months ago

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).

russdill2• 2 months ago

It certainly doesn't look like they've publicly released anything. My guess is they found a problem and have been following reasonable responsible disclosure guidelines. However, the 90 days (or whatever time limit was given) is likely expiring and to head off publication, flux.ai is getting lawyers involved.

This is all 100% speculation, just based on checking the archive sites and search sites historical data and finding nothing.

russdill2• 1 month ago

As their blog update an suit reveal, this is almost exactly the case. Plus more.

mlhpdx• 2 months ago

If you leave your door wide open folks on the sidewalk can take pictures and write about what they see all day long.

gfaster• 2 months ago

Whenever something like this comes up, I always think back to the excellent paper, "The Structure and Legal Interpretation of Computer Programs." I don't have a specific answer, but I like to review this paper whenever a question like this is posed.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4445484

taf2• 2 months ago

I wanted to love flux.ai because i love codex... and if i could automate the creation of some PCB projects with as much success as I am with codex it would have been quiet fun in the shop... so i gave them a $100~ bucks and i got like nothing in return so I decided i'd wait and see... sounds like it has not improved.

fn-mote• 2 months ago

I was surprised they didn't publish the text of the demand letter verbatim.

ladyada• 2 months ago

hi everyone, its me 'ladyada. we're very much looking forward to telling our story, i have reached out to the founder of flux.ai (Matthias Wagner - Founder & CEO at Flux), in hopes we can resolve this together and set a good example for the community. looking forward to maybe seeing this resolved on a podcast together, or something

disqard• 2 months ago

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

thr0w__4w4y• 2 months ago

(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.

jdcarter• 2 months ago

Adafruit's documentation and software maintenance is also top notch. I just built a new project using an ancient, no-longer-sold Adafruit PiTFT Plus which I had in my parts bin. Their software installer worked great on latest PiOS, and their data sheets had all the dimensions I needed. Outstanding.

dekhn• 2 months ago

Ditto- it played an important role in my entry to the world of electronics. Some of their breakout boards are my favorite (very nice layout, highly functional, well-documented).

mcritz• 2 months ago

I don’t want to just “me, too”, but I’ve literally had a career pivot to a role at Amazon Devices because I was able to bootstrap enough knowledge about building devices from Adafruit’s ecosystem and hardware.

Adafruit works tirelessly to build trust with the community. So, if they’re fighting something I just assume they’re doing it for our benefit.

otterley6• 2 months ago

Can we see the demand letter, please?

If not, why not?

My concern here is that this is like a child going to their parents to complain their sibling hit them, only to find out when you ask the sibling that the first one pushed them off their bicycle.

If you don't share it, I think it's a reasonable assumption that you're coming in with unclean hands, trying to use the court of opinion to gain sympathy while denying us the full picture.

johnobrien1010• 2 months ago

It seems prudent to me to not assume anything either way until you have more information

AviationAtom• 2 months ago

Their legal council may have advised them not to publish it at this moment

4Humboldt• 2 months ago

While usually legal to do so, it is typically also equally unwise to do so. That may displease you and others, but I don’t think that aspect is a highly relevant factor here.

mrandish2• 2 months ago

Ladyada mentions in the current top post of this thread that they've reached out to the Flux.ai founder to hopefully discuss a mutually satisfactory resolution.

Unilaterally publishing Flux's demand letter probably isn't prohibited but doing so prior to discussion or any notice IS a signal. And it's a signal that could be interpreted by Flux as non-constructive, escalation or possibly even combative. In the absence of clear communication, things can be interpreted incorrectly.

I've been in far too many of these potentially contentious, early-lawyer-letter loops over the decades. It's actually shocking how easily things can spiral into unintended escalation over essentially nothing, especially very early on. And the more things start amping up, even if only in one party's imagination, it's absurd how hard to can be to climb back down. Especially with lawyers in the loop who are incentivized to fully preserve all their client's rights, posture aggressively for tactical position and burn retainer 12 minutes at a time.

I finally started to "get it" after maybe the third time in three years where I discovered after several months, $15,000 and a bunch of stress that the whole stupid thing could have been sorted in the first week by acting slowly, dismissing my assumptions and resisting all my instincts about how to respond. Let's just give these folks a week to see if there's a way to hit CTRL+Z, before we start demanding details just so we can pass meaningless mob judgement on who's right or wrong.

elevaet• 2 months ago

Cool to see you on here ladyada, been a big fan since x0xb0x. I've always appreciated your conduct online, and will be cheering for the best possible outcome in this situation for you.

ahaucnx• 2 months ago

Unrelated to this (and sorry for highjacking this topic), but just want to say a big big thank you to ladyada for founding Adafruit.

When we decided to go fully open source hardware at AirGradient, I looked at the ‘business’ models of two companies: Adafruit and Arduino.

Seeing that both worked sustainably, made our decision much easier and it was probably one of the best decisions of our life. I just talked at the Open Hardware summit in Berlin about “50 devices later: The open source hardware advantage” [1].

[1] https://2026.oshwa.org/talks/100-achim-haug/

ptorrone3• 2 months ago

update jun 3, 2026

Before issuing any public response, and before involving the press - Limor wrote directly to Flux’s founder, Matthias Wagner. Not through lawyers. Founder to founder.

She proposed: a podcast of his choosing, open questions and answers, with the community watching and taking part. She offered to keep Phil off the podcast.

Her words:

“Before we both spend lots of time and money embroiled in a legal dispute, I would like to explore with you a way to reconcile things and perhaps turn this into a positive… adults with good intentions can work together and solve them… Cooler heads can prevail and we could set a good example for the community, building a future together where everyone can make and share electronics.”

She followed up the next day, again.

That offer stands. We would still rather build than litigate, and we would still rather talk in the open. We think that is how this should work - between two companies who both believe anyone with a browser should be able to make electronics, we can set a good example together.

We will update the community, and will still look forward to sharing our story.

- ladyada & pt

looneysquash• 2 months ago

I love the transparency that Adafruit is proving on this.

ncr1002• 2 months ago

In-line with their products - walking the talk!

xyst• 2 months ago

They lost me at subscription hell. Thanks, won’t touch this shit with a ten foot pole.

halebop• 2 months ago

I hadn’t even heard of flux.ai til now. Going to give it a spin tonight.

petiepooo• 2 months ago

If you're throwing benjamins away, send some my way.

zephen• 2 months ago

New user.

Single comment.

Completely ignores the rest of the ongoing salient discussion about how, yeah, Flux-AI isn't really working for a lot of people here.

Astroturf probability > three nines.

It must be a difficult realization, when you're selling vaporware, that your intended market (a) has hard metrics, and (b) has the wherewithal to quickly determine whether those metrics are being met.

tl;dr -- customers, especially technical customers, even if those technical customers are early adopters and generally positive on the idea of the special sauce you claim to be adding, are much more critical than investors. At least until the investors understand what the customers are saying.

rpdillon• 2 months ago

This is pretty great, in the sense that I'm now very aware I should avoid Flux.ai at all costs, and should recommend to others that they do the same.

mbonnet• 2 months ago

now I have a moral reason (in addition to clear engineering reasons) to never use Flux!

ncr1002• 2 months ago

IMO it is the management that made the decision - the people in charge are the interesting "never partner with" people, again IMO.

taco_emoji• 2 months ago

First I'm hearing of flux.ai and now my opinion of them is entirely negative because they hate free speech!

allthetime• 2 months ago

I'm sure they love free speech, except for the kind that reveals how shitty their product is

giancarlostoro• 2 months ago

Adafruit accessed only information that Flux’s own systems made publicly available through a server misconfiguration.

Did they access it knowing that there was a server misconfiguration or was this only learned of after the fact? Because Computer Fraud and Abuse is pretty serious.

dmitrygr• 2 months ago

Despite the lack of context (as is expected when gangsters like Fenwick and West get involved -- i've gotten letters from them), I will throw my lot in with Adafruit. The people who run Adafruit have been nothing but upstanding and reasonable the entire time that business has existed. I'm willing to bet that they are in the right knowing only that -- it is enough.

spamizbad• 2 months ago

I'm not sure if this was Flux, but one of those AI EDA tool companies had a somewhat absurd ad where the narrator stated the AI tool told them a capacitor was being used to block DC, and that's something they never learned while getting an EE degree. Now, I don't have an EE degree, but I feel like how capacitors interact with AC and DC are sort of "passive components 101" that even hobbyists learn quite early on.

The EDA space doesn't strike me as being anywhere near as SWE when it comes to AI.

tagami• 2 months ago

Are there any AI tools that can create quality PCB work yet?

teaearlgraycold2• 2 months ago

Extremely embarrassing for my country that this is what the FBI is spending time on.

dghlsakjg3• 2 months ago

The FBI isn't involved. A former FBI employee is.

teaearlgraycold2• 2 months ago

My bad

K0balt• 2 months ago

I tried flux and it was a total waste of time. I get the idea it’s for rank beginners, maybe it’s useful at that level?

Honestly, I haven’t seen an autorouter that doesn’t take at least as much time as it takes to do it by hand to sort out the results. But then I’m also not paying thousands for premium tools, so???

I find that with some experience, routing and placement is kinda the fun part..

mctaggart• 2 months ago

SICP Erlang on cargo-fuzzed relay.

lightedman• 2 months ago

Flux.ai is probably trying to hide the fact their product does not do what it says it does and they're basically scamming you out of your money (won't even refund you for prompts that did not do what they said they would do.) The entire thing was trash when I tried it two years ago and it's still very much trash now, not even able to do a basic TSOP LED driver without you needing to spend hundreds of dollars to correct its mistakes.

joshfee• 2 months ago

For those interested in leveraging AI to build circuit boards, check out https://tscircuit.com/

I have no affiliation to the project, just someone that's done some hobby PCB design in the past and a couple weeks ago was exploring what's available in age of AI. Flux looked expensive and unimpressive. While it definitely burned through some tokens, I was able to get a seemingly functional PCB meeting my design requirements and was able to iterate on it using my existing Claude code subscription. I did use Gemini for some of the initial design research and parts selection since I find its search a bit better, but was overall impressed. I think with some tuning of the Claude skills to have it do a bit less guess-and-check it could be a nice workflow. Definitely better than the either really dated or really expensive PCB design tools in the market.

Courty2• 2 months ago

How about doing it properly and without a bunch of poor design decisions ?

Courty2• 2 months ago

This whole think is crazy. We’re being expected to pay to develop their tools which quite frankly are fairly poor. I’m sure at some point they will get better but like the AI code, its volume over quantity. Code and PCB design is part science and part art. The AI boy do neither well. I have had several frustrating sessions trying to explain a simple concept to it and burning through tokens to do something an intern would be able to do in an hour. For code it’s a good sounding board and for PCB’s it’s a waste of a good designers time. And if you point this out? A desist letter.. that says to me they know the systems are floored, buggy and not value for money..

Adafruit receives demand letter from Fenwick legal counsel on behalf of Flux.ai

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