Drone hobbyist has Astra design a six-layer flight controller board in 3 hours
A Chinese drone hobbyist used Codex with GPT-6 Astra on high reasoning to go from a text brief to Gerber, BOM and STEP files with zero ERC/DRC errors, spending 51.9 million tokens.
a drone hobbyist in china filmed GPT-6 Astra doing a $25,000 engineering job and posted it like a weekend project 3 hours 13 minutes 56 seconds. a six-layer flight controller board, from a text brief to the files a factory needs. he never drew a single wire pause at 0:01, right side of the screen. that panel is the whole method: Astra's plan, every script it wrote for itself, every check it ran. he was showing off the 3D render and left the method in the frame Astra's last message, readable through the chinese: ERC 0 errors. DRC 0 errors. 0 unconnected pause at 0:48. solve_congestion.py. when the board got crowded it wrote its own tool to untangle it what he did: → opened codex inside the chatgpt app, picked GPT-6 Astra, reasoning on high → one brief: an F405 six-layer FPV flight controller and what it has to carry → Astra drew the schematic, placed every part and routed all six layers inside KiCad itself. he watched the cursor move. KiCad is free → it ran ERC and DRC on its own work, fixed the circuit and the layout, ran them again → exported gerber, drill files, BOM, pick-and-place coordinates and a STEP model you can spin in 3D 51,900,896 tokens. it thought for 3 hours straight. the machine that did it costs $20 a month now the money: US design shops quote $10,000 to $25,000 for a six-layer mixed-signal board in 2026. engineering marketplaces estimate 360+ hours of layout for a dense one. the average PCB designer makes $86,437 a year one board a week at the bottom of that price list is $40,000 a month. the engineer is a $200 subscription and a free program people with zero PCB experience are already running the same loop on here this week he wanted to show off a drone part. he showed everyone what a $25,000 job costs now what would you have it draw first?
This post quotes another post: x.com/argona0x/status/2098067261688811922