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Comment by andrewklofas | Hacker News Reader

Hit this exact wall six months back building Claude Code stuff for KiCad review[1]. First pass let Claude read .kicad_sch directly via grep/read. It happily invented pin numbers that didn't exist. Rewrote it with Python analyzers that spit out JSON, now Claude just reads the JSON, problem mostly went away.

Curious how spicelib-mcp handles models that aren't in the bundled library. Do you pass the .lib path as a tool arg, or does the server own a registry?

[1] https://github.com/aklofas/kicad-happy

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Different domain but similar pattern — I hit a related wall building an MCP server for Claude Desktop (Obsidian-based memory system). Not a registry question, but adjacent: how much state the server should own vs. pass through.

The thing that bit me hardest wasn't architectural though, it was a hardcoded 60-second tool call timeout in the MCP SDK used by Claude Desktop. app.asar confirms it — no config knob to raise it. For any long-running tool (mine: extracting and summarizing a 50-page PDF) the only option is detached spawn: Phase 1 kicks off work and returns "queued" within 60s, Phase 2 runs fire-and-forget and writes results to disk for a later kioku_list call to pick up.

If your server ever does work that might exceed ~45 seconds on Desktop, worth designing that in early. Claude Code's CLI doesn't have this limit, but Desktop users will hit it.

Spicelib really just makes calls to the selected spice engine (in my case ngspice). In this setup spicelib‘s main job is to parse the raw spice data and have a unified interface regardless which spice engine is selected. But to answer the question: the path to the spice model must currently be set explicitly.

very cool, im working on a similar kicad tool for dong the fully schematic generation and pcb layout using python generated by AI. Not quite ready to publish it yet, but im glad im not the only one who sees the potential of AI generated code + kicad

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