Notes
Engineering notes: what we shipped, what broke, what we learned.
Someone else's layout
2026-09-05Jane Street shipped a bare-GDS sky130 puzzle; our agents read it back to gate-level Verilog in about ten working hours — and found the Morse code under the die.
4 min readagentsopen-sourcehardwarebuild-in-public
A self-improvement loop with a referee
2026-08-17Chip design against the four criteria for domains where machine self-improvement actually works: a referee you can't fool, at machine speed.
4 min readagentsopen-sourcehardwarebuild-in-public
How we picked the first ten blocks
2026-08-14The rubric came first, the scores thirteen minutes later — demand, feasibility, and tool friction, with the git history as the receipt.
4 min readhardwareopen-sourceagentsbuild-in-public
Five more blocks, and one that got worse
2026-08-04Wave two of the canary blocks, and what the append-only records cost when a result goes the wrong way.
5 min readhardwareopen-sourceagentsbuild-in-public
Two bandgaps, in the open
2026-07-31Wave one of the canary blocks: gf180-bandgap and sky130-bandgap, and the evidence trail behind them.
3 min readhardwareopen-sourceagentsbuild-in-public
One engineer, a fleet of agents
2026-07-28The operating model, mechanically.
3 min readagentsoperating-modelbuild-in-public