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.
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