Redditor runs Astra uninterrupted for 12 hours on a PCB design task
PhonicUK · reddit · 2026-09-16
Reddit user PhonicUK reports running the AI agent Astra on a single non-trivial PCB design task for 12 hours straight, using KiCad's headless tooling with formal validation against both standard DRC and PCBWay's own DRC rules.
Key observations:
- Human-like progress curve: fast and cheap at the start, crawling near the finish line.
- Key tip: explicitly tell it to use its vision system to inspect layer drawings; purely programmatic validation produced "weird jank" — after adding visual checks it got slower but much better.
- Unprecedented persistence: the author says no major AI had ever worked continuously beyond an hour or two before, while Astra ran literally through the night.
More from coding & agent
- Microsoft's MemSteer turns unlabeled user histories into agent memory supervision — MicrosoftResearch · 2026-11-02
- She fired herself from her own Instagram: AI agent runs the account, views up 82.3% — heyshrutimishra · 2026-11-02
- Sourcegraph: AI writes code faster than teams can review it, driving more outages — AI Engineer · 2026-11-02
- Tsinghua & Microsoft's HarnessMM cuts agent token use by up to 87.93% while raising success rate — rohanpaul_ai · 2026-11-02
- GitHub launches Agent HQ: Anthropic, OpenAI, Google coding agents in Copilot — emmanuelvivier · 2026-11-02
- DeepSeek open-sources Super-Agent, a coding agent that reads team chats to minimize human input — emmanuelvivier · 2026-11-02