Artificial intelligence is increasingly entering areas that previously required deep engineering knowledge. One Reddit user decided to test the limits of Claude Fable 5 and asked him to personally design a full-fledged printed circuit board – from circuit to finished device.
The task proved to be quite difficult: the board had to match the dimensions of a 1.54-inch e-ink display GDEY0154D67-FL04, for use with a Raspberry Pi Pico 2350, with four buttons, I2C and GPIO interfaces. The experiment authors set strict rules in advance: there are no human corrections or design checks, and all issues before the production stage must be solved by the AI itself. However, some mistakes were made – Cloud repeatedly selected inappropriate components, so the developers had to continue the conversation and seek corrections.
As a result, the project reached production. For five assembled boards, the user paid about 130 euros, and the total cost of Claude API credits when creating the device was about $450. After all the iterations, the board works and the software written by Claude Opus 5 interacts with it correctly.
The finished device connects to an e-ink screen, allowing you to choose from features like a photo album, e-reader, notes, and stopwatch. This experiment is impressive, but it also shows the cost of such functionality: it’s a fun project for hobbyists, while scaling this approach can be very expensive.