They Built a Hardware Version of Lovable, and the First Creation Is a Cat That Only Glows
Justin Kim says they built a “hardware version of Lovable”; the product is called HeyPCB, and the video shows five prototypes ranging from a glowing cat to a quadcopter. It puts schematic capture, component selection, PCB layout, routing, and verification into one web page. A commenter pressed on how it compares with Claude plus KiCad, and the reply came down to workflow integration rather than the model. Another question about where the model’s data comes from went unanswered.
Justin Kim posted on X with just one sentence: “We built Lovable for hardware.” It was followed by a link to the heypcb.ai dashboard and a video.
The video shows five things: a black cat-shaped ornament with white eyes and a red LED embedded in its body; a card with a grid texture and circuit-board elements showing at the edges; a quadcopter body with a square slot in the middle for a camera or sensor; a handheld device with a screen and buttons on the front and a battery compartment on the back; and a small multi-button control panel with a different symbol printed on each key.
These products all come from HeyPCB. According to Justin, the goal is to make hardware as easy as software.
One very practical question came up in the comments. DataBased said they had been planning to use Claude plus KiCad to design a platform PCB and wanted to know what HeyPCB’s engineering-level advantages are; custom shapes and colored boards mean nothing to them. They also mentioned that Grok, based on public data, judged HeyPCB to be better, but the question was whether it was worth the cost, since KiCad is free.
Justin replied twice. Custom shapes are mainly to show what’s possible; the real value is putting the entire engineering workflow in one place, from schematic and component selection to PCB layout, routing, and design verification. In another reply, he added that you can connect Claude to HeyPCB through MCP, so it doesn’t have to be either/or.
That’s the extent of the information in those two sentences. It doesn’t boast about how strong the model is; the selling point is workflow integration. For people used to repeatedly wrangling libraries, footprints, and DRC in KiCad, that’s appealing. Of course, whether it’s worth the price depends on how well each step is executed.
There is also another question left hanging. Easton LaChappelle asked where the model’s data comes from, and no response was visible in the comments. That is probably the question these hardware AI tools most need to be asked.
There are also more than 15,000 open-source PCBs you can use directly at https://heypcb.ai/world ; you can browse them, learn from them, and modify them on top of other people’s work. For people without a hardware background, first seeing how others draw things is more practical than generating a board from scratch.
Gaurang asked what the first board would be that makes people stop and think, “Wait, really?” Justin replied that it would probably be the kind of board people have been saying they’ll “do next weekend” for three years. That answer is pretty honest, and it also incidentally points to this kind of tool’s user profile: not mature hardware teams, but people who have piled up a bunch of ideas without acting on them.
The tweet says that free AI credits are currently being given to everyone.
发布时间: 2026-11-01 21:47