Show HN: Spice simulation → oscilloscope → verification with Claude Code
claude open-source
| Source: HN | Original article
A Hacker News post this week put Claude Code front‑and‑center as a hands‑on assistant for analog designers. The author uploaded a notebook that starts with a SPICE netlist, feeds it to an open‑source simulator, renders the resulting waveforms as an oscilloscope trace, and then asks Claude Code to verify that the simulated behavior matches the design intent. The AI not only generated the SPICE code from a high‑level description of a low‑pass filter but also wrote the Python glue that launches ngspice, extracts the voltage data, and plots it with Matplotlib in a style that mimics a real‑world scope. After the plot is produced, a follow‑up prompt asks Claude to compare the measured rise time against the target specification, and the model returns a concise pass/fail verdict with suggested tweaks.
Why it matters is twofold. First, it demonstrates that large‑language‑model coding assistants have moved beyond software‑only tasks and can reliably orchestrate the full simulation‑verification loop that has traditionally required specialist EDA tools such as LTspice, PSpice or KiCad’s ngspice integration. Second, the workflow is fully reproducible and runs on a laptop, lowering the barrier for small teams and hobbyists to adopt rigorous verification without buying expensive licenses. As we reported on 16 April, Claude Code already proved its value in a product‑migration scenario; this new showcase extends its reach into the analog domain, a sector where AI assistance has been slower to appear.
What to watch next is whether Anthropic will ship dedicated plugins for popular circuit‑design environments or expose an API that lets CAD vendors embed Claude Code directly into schematic editors. Competitors are likely to follow suit, and the next round of benchmark releases for Claude Opus 4.7 may include hardware‑design test suites. If the community adopts this pattern, AI‑driven verification could become a standard step in the design flow, reshaping how Nordic hardware startups iterate on silicon.
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