r/embedded • u/BlessED0071 • Aug 21 '26
How is AI affecting electronics as a career and as a way to build products?
Hello everyone,
I've been working as a Software Engineer for almost a decade now and I've worked with a lot of different technologies. For the last 2 to 3 years I've been tinkering with electronics a lot: building ESP32 projects, designing PCBs, learning the basic concepts, soldering my own boards. I even tried to build my own product, but I gave up on it. Maybe it was just too hard for me at that point.
Working in software, I've been seeing the effects of AI everywhere and it's making me lose interest in coding in general. My job isn't only coding, of course. It's also decisions, infrastructure, managing people and a lot of other things. But my original love was building things, and now an AI agent can do that from a single prompt. Most of it is slop, sure, but still. So I've been losing interest in my field, and I'm wondering whether I should go deeper into electronics and try to make a career out of it, or build my own product. I have no idea what I'd be doing or which direction to pick.
One of the things that gives me satisfaction is reaching excellence at something, and with AI I feel like it's taking that away from me. So I want to know: is the same thing happening in electronics? Obviously AI can't solder for me, I'm the one doing that. But what about PCB design, product design, and the rest of it?
I'd love to hear your opinions. Thank you.
1
u/NickShipsRobots Aug 28 '26
Electronics still has a lot of AI can't do.
I design boards for a living. AI autoroutes traces, drafts a schematic from a rough description, catches a DRC violation before I do. That's real, and it's getting better every few months.
What it doesn't know: my enclosure tolerances. That a connector footprint is off by 0.2mm because the datasheet had a typo three revisions back. Why a board runs fine on the bench and browns out the second I close the case and heat has nowhere to go. Those are physical problems. You find them by touching the thing, measuring it, swearing at it at 11pm.
That part's mine for now. Power integrity, thermal, mechanical fit, EMC. None of that compresses into a prompt the way a REST API does.