Konnect: 228-tool MCP server lets Claude edit KiCad 10 circuit boards

Konnect, an open-source plugin that lets AI assistants design schematics and circuit boards in KiCad 10, was posted to Hacker News on 14 October 2026 and reached 102 points and 36 comments (news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50085553). Its README, written by the author, calls it a beta release. It is a single Rust binary that exposes 228 tools to Claude and other assistants through the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

What the author says it does

• Schematic work: place components and wire them by pin name, editing KiCad schematic files directly with atomic writes (write, flush, rename) so an edit cannot leave a half-written file.
• Board work: place, move, rotate and route footprints in a running KiCad through its IPC (inter-process communication) API, with undo and redo preserved.
• Checks: run electrical and design rule checks (ERC, DRC), plus audits of decoupling, power rails and the bill of materials.
• Manufacturing: search a local catalogue of 2.5 million JLCPCB parts and export Gerbers, drill files, BOM and pick-and-place files.

A design choice worth copying: tools on demand

The author reports that exposing all 228 tools costs roughly 23K tokens of context every time the model lists them. Konnect instead loads a starter kit of about 2K tokens and lets the model request toolsets as it needs them. It also logs every call (JSONL files and a get_recent_calls tool) so the model can diagnose its own tool failures. These are the author's figures; the README publishes no benchmark. Any team wiring many tools into an agent faces the same context cost.

What commenters found

The thread is hands-on. One commenter says their team built a similar in-house tool and finds jobs like replicating a datasheet's reference layout as a test board "basically solved", while denser layouts are "a stretch". Another reports that the model is very good at stackup and part configuration but produces poor routes, such as long runs of tiny jogs where two 45-degree turns would do. A third said a design with unusual GaN transistors went badly because the model got part packaging and footprints wrong. Several describe a workable pattern: pin a few key traces, hand the rest to the Freerouting autorouter, run the checks in a loop, and review the result yourself.

Not everyone was convinced. One commenter noted the repository has AI-styled text and no example schematic or board files, so a reader cannot yet judge output quality. Others pointed to alternatives, including the author's earlier MIT-licensed Python and TypeScript server and a fork of KiCad called Backplane.

What it costs and what it runs on

The software has no price, but the licence matters for companies. The README says hobbyists, students, freelancers and open-source projects can use it freely. A business that builds on or around Konnect must release that work under AGPL-3.0, which applies to network-provided software too, or take a commercial licence; the terms are in a separate file I did not read. It needs KiCad 10 and its kicad-cli tool. The README says Windows is the most-tested platform, macOS binaries are not code-signed, and Linux compiles and passes CI tests but has had no per-platform QA.

What a team could take from it

• If your engineers use KiCad, try it on a throwaway board first, and treat the checks and parts search as the safe use.
• Have a person review placement and routing; the thread's reports match that advice, though they are anecdotes, not measurements.
• Have legal read the AGPL terms before building anything internal around it.
• Unknown from these sources: any measured error rate, the cost in model tokens per board, and how it performs on unusual parts.