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Adafruit receives demand letter from Fenwick legal counsel on behalf of Flux.ai
- mctaggart 4mo agoSICP Erlang on cargo-fuzzed relay.
- embirdating 4mo ago[dead]
- antirez 4mo agoNote that this is not related to Black Forest Labs Flux, the image synthesis models builders, and is instead related to a PCB AI authoring product called Flux.ai.
- villgax 4mo ago> Time to shine Nor is this Flux the display warmth app
- justinclift 4mo agoThanks, that name was indeed making me wonder what's going on with the BFL people. :)
- suncemoje 4mo agoExactly, these vectors point in very different directions!
- Trung0246 4mo agoAlso not related to https://fluxkeyboard.com/ https://fluxkeyboard.com/
- xd1936 4mo agoNor f.lux, the warm light software that got Sherlocked by every major OS. https://justgetflux.com/ https://justgetflux.com/
- kid64 4mo agoNor the Flux Capacitor from Back to the Future.
- OrangeMusic 4mo agoNor the famed Good Will Hunting and Argo actor and director, Ben Afflux
- somewhatgoated 4mo agoMan that’s a blast from the past; used to be one of my fav apps.
- brianjlogan 4mo agoNor the continuous delivery K8s tool. https://fluxcd.io/ https://fluxcd.io/
- baobabKoodaa 4mo agoThere's a lesson in here about how to name your product, but I can't quite flux my finger on it
- fintler 4mo agoDon't forget about the (awesome) cluster scheduler, Flux. https://hpc-tutorials.llnl.gov/flux/ https://hpc-tutorials.llnl.gov/flux/
- rboyd 4mo agoalso unrelated to a private repo I have in my github named flux
- kasabali 4mo agoWhat's the context here?
- Neil44 4mo agoIt seems there's suspiciously little context available, yet here I also am commenting on a 'vaguepost'. I wonder if one day AI will be able to filter out vagueposts from my browser along with ragebait and curiosity gap headlines.
- abirch 4mo agoIf AI does that it’ll make us 10x readers
- alexfoo 4mo agoIndeed, however: 10 x 0.1 = 1
- pavel_lishin 4mo agoBold of you to assume my reading ability is that high.
- lstodd 4mo agothat depends on floating width. might also end up being a NaN.
- throw_a_grenade 4mo agoIt's deliberately written that way, by lawyers who are making sure they (Adafruit) won't accidentaly admit to something they didn't.
- somewhatgoated 4mo agoIdk now that there are bunch of comments on the thread it’s vastly more interesting.
- 4mo ago
- throwa356262 4mo agoHad no idea about this. Now I do. Thank you, lawyers. If you ever find yourself out of work use this as your reference to pivot to advertisement
- coalstartprob 4mo ago[dead]
- luma 4mo agoFlux.ai offers a PCB design solution which is a clear interest for Adafruit. Anyone have any idea what this is about?
- barnas2 4mo ago> Flux.ai offers a PCB design solution "solution" is an interesting choice. I haven't talked to anyone who tried it and actually got anything useful. It completely failed when I tried using it.
- tecleandor 4mo agoFlux just got funding from Bain and others, and it feels like Adafruit was preparing a post about it. Maybe they contacted Flux to confirm some info and they freaked out? I can't find in archive.org if they had a previous post about it. Also, seems like there a good bunch of complains in Reddit about Flux and its billing... https://old.reddit.com/r/PCB/comments/1t476x4/warning_fluxai_billing_traps_and_deceptive/ https://old.reddit.com/r/PCB/comments/1t476x4/warning_fluxai...
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- karmicthreat 4mo agoAdafruit probably did a review of AI PCB tools. I've used Flux.ai before; it was a pretty bad experience. After about 50-100$ in tokens a couple of times, I couldn't get more than a couple of simple components on the schematic. And not in sensible positions. The product just grinds tokens for little return, in my opinion. I had far better luck wiring together KiCad MCP, SKIDL. There are some AI-driven autorouters out there now. Placement is probably the big issue that needs to be solved now. I could only get about 80% of what I wanted together with my hacky workflow.
- embedding-shape 4mo ago> After about 50-100$ in tokens a couple of times, I couldn't get more than a couple of simple components on the schematic. Is this common? When I try out new AI tools, even as person who is financially independent, I load up maybe 10-20 USD worth of tokens, and if I don't get anything working from that, I literally give up and don't continue trying. If it can't do anything useful like "place a simple component on the schematic" after ~10 USD of expenditure, is it really worth continue adding more money into the platform? Seems DOA in those cases.
- karmicthreat 4mo agoI used company money on it. I was hoping I could massage it along enough to get a workable test fixture out of it. I wanted to put together a simple hardware-in-the-loop tester for a component of our product.
- phs318u 4mo agoSomeone should’ve told these guys: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48337328 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48337328
- StephenSmith 4mo agoI tried this last week and had the same experience. It was terrible and they got $140 out of me before I realized what it was (not) capable of. Their support was nonexistent as well.
- inshane 4mo agoAs an electrical engineer who has tried to use it multiple times, I think Flux is an absolutely awful product. No surprise at all that they want to sweep details about their “intellectual property, commercial traction and user base” under the rug.
- cryo32 4mo agoYeah this stuff isn't even realistic as well. A number of years ago I was working on something professionally and there was a problem. Only about 1 in 5 boards assembled wouldn't crash the CPU. After much debugging it turned out one of the ICs had an open collector output and it wasn't loaded correctly with a pull up resistor. This caused a cascading failure, held the bus up when initialising the hardware which hit the WDT and reset the CPU over and over again. If you aren't there designing the thing in the first place, you never read the datasheets, never drew the schematic, never placed the components and thus don't know where to look when something goes wrong. And it does go wrong. And then you're in deep shit. I worry about people who think they can get a product out of the door with this stuff but can't.
- SV_BubbleTime 4mo agoEverything you said is exactly the proper argument against vibe coding. If you can’t or don’t entirely go over the output, the failure mode is invisible.
- cryo32 4mo agoVibe coding is certainly the main part of it. But another problem is how deep our software and hardware stacks are. There is too much information to retain to solve problems now.
- ACCount37 4mo agoIn the pure software domain, this is solved by letting the AI own the entire loop. The AI writes the code, runs the code, tests the code, troubleshoots the code and fixes the code. Embedded might be resistant to it, because software-hardware interactions are notoriously hard to sim, and AI still struggles with meatspace operations. Not that it would stop anyone! You say "people who think they can get a product out of the door with this stuff but can't" and I immediately think: Arduino. That was also seen as a way to introduce people who understand nothing about embedded to embedded. Surely no one would ever go from an Arduino prototype to an actual production run? Ha ha WRONG. I've seen actual production hardware ship with Arduino firmware, because no one cared enough to fully rewrite that cobbled together Arduino firmware from the first prototype. The FW team just went over it enough to whack-a-mole the most obvious issues, and shipped the result. So, no. People are absolutely going to ship AI genned embedded hardware, and get away with it too. I bet that by now, someone already did.
- yodon 4mo ago> Adafruit’s reporting concerns a matter of public security interest and was conducted in the ordinary course of responsible disclosure
- wewewedxfgdf 4mo agoSuing the industry won't win them customers/friends.
- bob001 4mo agoI suspect they don't care. Their only goal is likely to get enough good PR to sell to some big tech or AI company for an absurd valuation.
- TZubiri 4mo ago>The letter further asserts claims under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Adafruit accessed only information that Flux’s own systems made publicly available through a server misconfiguration A confession
- Ekaros 4mo agoThey vibe coded their system and it showed Adafruit something? Or showed some information with trivial prodding? Sounds like your average cross-tenant leak. Maybe showing more than intended or some caching issue. Many options some not really not fault of Adafruit.
- TZubiri 4mo agoI don't know the details of the case, but what they worded there is a textbook unauthorized intrusion and a naïve teenager "the door was open" defense. Mind you there can be nuances, but that quote is like saying "I took their stuff, but it was poking out of their pocket."
- Ekaros 4mo agoIt is bit grey area. You are evaluating something. Do some basic checks. Actually end up seeing something you should not. You stop and tell them to fix it. They then silence you. Now it is bit questionable should you check things like this during evaluation or not. Strict legal reading probably not. With reasonable customer relations you thank them and put it on top of the priority list. Unless they clearly enumerated everything they got their hands on or tried to run more real scans.
- mindslight 4mo agoNo, it's more like "the door was open" in the context of a storefront. A public website carries an implicit invitation to visit, otherwise web browsing would be illegal.
- sq_ 4mo agoI think people have a heightened reaction to threats based on the CFAA for "the door was open" circumstances because that law is so widely known for being used in threats against folks who were trying to ethically report things and in overly-aggressive prosecutions. Of course, we don't yet know the specifics of this particular case, but I'm willing to lean towards the people receiving legal letters threatening CFAA action until there's more information.
- raphman 4mo agoNever heard of Flux.ai before. It seems to be a 3D circuit designer with 'AI'. Not sure what the issue between them and Adafruit is. However, people over on Reddit¹ claim that Flux.ai is a little bit scummy. They push users into a beginner trial ($5/month) and then silently charge for usage per token - up to $100 per month. Oh, they also claim that they have "the world's largest community-driven public library of Adafruit products, including footprints, symbols, datasheets, and simulation models"². I wonder whether they designed these themselves or whether they use existing ones. Could not easily find licenses info. ¹) https://www.reddit.com/r/PCB/comments/18o5zfo/thoughts_on_fluxai/ https://www.reddit.com/r/PCB/comments/18o5zfo/thoughts_on_fl... ²) https://www.flux.ai/sitemap/manufacturers/adafruit https://www.flux.ai/sitemap/manufacturers/adafruit
- gowld 4mo agoFlux.ai is abusing Adafruit's trademark while harassing Adafruit with a lawsuit. Wow!
- dghlsakjg 4mo ago> Oh, they also claim that they have "the world's largest community-driven public library of Adafruit products, including footprints, symbols, datasheets, and simulation models"². I wonder whether they designed these themselves or whether they use existing ones. Could not easily find licenses info. Their PCB designs are mostly CC Attribution-ShareAlike typically. What's funny is that most Adafruit products aren't exactly secret. Most of them have open source schematics and PCB layouts. Even when they aren't, they pretty much just a reference design from a data sheet. The kind of people that have the competence to be using board design software could replicate their designs pretty easily.
- 0x59 4mo agoFrom what I can tell, the message is When you discover an exploit, only communicate with source (and pray they respond) or get sued. Seems like the position is customers and stakeholders shouldn't be allowed access to this information.
- sigmoid10 4mo agoThat's actually very common even with respected bug bounty programs. Communicating exploits to anyone else (let alone the general public) will at the very least make you ineligible for rewards.
- 0x59 4mo agoIMO if you're participating in a BB program, you should abide by he rules set forth by the program. If you're not, then you don't have to.
- whstl 4mo agoSeems similar to what Microsoft is doing lately: https://www.cpomagazine.com/cyber-security/microsoft-doubles-down-on-opposition-to-public-disclosure-as-chaotic-eclipse-wave-of-zero-day-vulnerabilities-continues/ https://www.cpomagazine.com/cyber-security/microsoft-doubles...
- ptorrone 4mo agohi everyone, phil and limor here, any questions for now, email press@adafruit.com limor and i are very much looking forward to telling our story.
- zettabomb 4mo agoI'm curious, but I'm not sure if you can say - has Adafruit ever published anything about Flux?
- jdnrebd 4mo agoYou should read the linked article
- zettabomb 4mo agoI have, and the article does not in any way address my question. You also seem to be a brand new user, so in case you're not aware, HN guidelines say to refrain from mentioning whether or not someone has read the link.
- subscribed 4mo agoAs a long time reader I keep wondering how it is more conductive to the discourse to comment without reading than to point that the answers might be in the article someone ignored.
- sgc 4mo agoJust reply with a quote from the article. They will understand they did not read carefully, and you can avoid the low-value 'read the article' snark (that might be false since often it is not actually in the article when somebody does that).
- subscribed 4mo agoMy question wasn't "how to handle that better". I hope it's okay to point it out :) I would also argue it's not "often" the case someone asking the obvious question seemingly answered in the article had actually read it. It happens, surely, but it's not a rule of thumb. That's too meta for a thread here anyways, I think.
- reactordev 4mo agoStruck a nerve, but I wouldn’t back down. If they do take you to court, there’s this wonderful thing called discovery.
- Falimonda 4mo agoHad anyone tried AutoPCB (https://autopcb.app/ https://autopcb.app/) instead? Seems especially useful when paired with an agentic coding tool!
- pftburger 4mo agoYep, and it’s terrible Not only did it burn a 100$ failing but it did so in a very untransparent way. I bought a 20 dollar plan but they snuck a 100$ billed usage into the billing agreements next thing I know the agent as used the quote going in circles and my card is billed.
- reactordev 4mo agoWe need outcome based billing... I don't want to pay for a service that doesn't deliver.
- elevation 4mo ago> We need outcome based billing... I don't want to pay for a service that doesn't deliver. You can already do this: hire a consultancy to build you a working deliverable for a fixed price. They will be incentivized to prompt their tools well and to avoid tools that are consistently pathological.
- somewhatgoated 4mo agoThey will also charge a lot more than you using the service if they aren’t charlatans Edit: actually they probably will charge even more if they are charlatans
- trollbridge 4mo agoI’m so sick of this that I go to the trouble to set up prepaid cards to pay for these things now. A handful of honest participants like DeepSeek are pay as you go instead of trying to sneakily bill you for usage.
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- xuzhenpeng 4mo ago[flagged]
- RagnarD 4mo agoLooks like Flux.ai got some publicity out of this. Maybe not the kind they wanted - after reading this thread, I'll sure never give them a dime.
- somewhatgoated 4mo agoYea I had no idea this product exists but it seems to be pretty horrible from the experiences shared in this thread
- kevin_thibedeau 4mo agoA flawed product is forgivable. A SLAPP means permanent corporate exile. You lose Flux.ai.
- Mr_Eri_Atlov 4mo agoI previously had a passing interest in Flux, now I'm certain it's a fraud.
- mannanj 4mo agoWhy do we tolerate this bullying and misconduct from companies that harms us and progress overall? Is there really no solution in this day and age for harmful behavior and aggression and hostility like what it looks like Flux is doing here? I can't believe we don't have an answer, I think it's just that the bad guys are drowning us in noise and making it hard for us to identify the solutions where we band together a la David v Goliath against them.
- axegon_ 4mo agoFor anyone that has been missing the memo on how to become rich: 1. Make a slop machine that's a wrapper around another slop machine like claude, openai, google or whatever. 2. Hire a lawyer to send threatening emails to anyone that might call you out. 3. Get a few investors that are completely clueless to throw a ton of cash at you for having ai in your product. 4. Profit. Honestly, get a hold of Louis Rossmann, this shit needs to stop.
- pavel_lishin 4mo ago> Adafruit accessed only information that Flux’s own systems made publicly available through a server misconfiguration Does anyone have some more context about what happened here? An uncharitable analogy might be that I misconfigured my front door by not locking it, which doesn't give someone the right to walk in and look around - but I have no idea what Adafruit is specifically being accused of doing.
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 4mo agoThat isn’t legal in most jurisdictions either. You’re not a lawyer.
- somewhatgoated 4mo agoWhat isn’t legal? Cant really square your comment with GP comment.
- pavel_lishin 4mo agoThat's rather my point. And yep, I'm not a lawyer - and even if I were, I couldn't begin to speculate about this post because it says so little.
- mindslight 4mo agoIt often does when your front door is otherwise a business storefront. Without knowing the specifics of what was accessed, analogies really aren't helpful. And there seems to be zero context here, so this strikes me as the most plausible scenario: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48368635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48368635 (I agree that Adafruit's statement itself is worded pretty terribly!)
- dghlsakjg 4mo agowhat about if I knock on the door (send an http request), and someone comes to it and hands me a bunch of documents (sends an http response with data).
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- taf2 4mo agoI wanted to love flux.ai because i love codex... and if i could automate the creation of some PCB projects with as much success as I am with codex it would have been quiet fun in the shop... so i gave them a $100~ bucks and i got like nothing in return so I decided i'd wait and see... sounds like it has not improved.
- hanzeweiasa 4mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- fn-mote 4mo agoI was surprised they didn't publish the text of the demand letter verbatim.
- ladyada 4mo agohi everyone, its me 'ladyada. we're very much looking forward to telling our story, i have reached out to the founder of flux.ai (Matthias Wagner - Founder & CEO at Flux), in hopes we can resolve this together and set a good example for the community. looking forward to maybe seeing this resolved on a podcast together, or something
- disqard 4mo agoGood luck! Big fan of your work for many, many years. Thank you for the amazing resource that is Adafruit.
- thr0w__4w4y 4mo ago(somewhat) unrelated to this kerfuffle, but I can say I've ordered thousands of dollars of stuff from Adafruit, and the quality of the electronics, the speed of shipping, the prices, and the customer service have been consistently outstanding. Hope common sense prevails and Adafruit can go back to doing what it does best instead of dealing with this (IMO) distraction.
- jdcarter 4mo agoAdafruit's documentation and software maintenance is also top notch. I just built a new project using an ancient, no-longer-sold Adafruit PiTFT Plus which I had in my parts bin. Their software installer worked great on latest PiOS, and their data sheets had all the dimensions I needed. Outstanding.
- dekhn 4mo agoDitto- it played an important role in my entry to the world of electronics. Some of their breakout boards are my favorite (very nice layout, highly functional, well-documented).
- mcritz 4mo agoI don’t want to just “me, too”, but I’ve literally had a career pivot to a role at Amazon Devices because I was able to bootstrap enough knowledge about building devices from Adafruit’s ecosystem and hardware. Adafruit works tirelessly to build trust with the community. So, if they’re fighting something I just assume they’re doing it for our benefit.
- looneysquash 4mo agoI love the transparency that Adafruit is proving on this.
- ncr100 4mo agoIn-line with their products - walking the talk!
- xyst 4mo agoThey lost me at subscription hell. Thanks, won’t touch this shit with a ten foot pole.
- halebop 4mo agoI hadn’t even heard of flux.ai til now. Going to give it a spin tonight.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- petiepooo 4mo agoIf you're throwing benjamins away, send some my way.
- zephen 4mo agoNew user. Single comment. Completely ignores the rest of the ongoing salient discussion about how, yeah, Flux-AI isn't really working for a lot of people here. Astroturf probability > three nines. It must be a difficult realization, when you're selling vaporware, that your intended market (a) has hard metrics, and (b) has the wherewithal to quickly determine whether those metrics are being met. tl;dr -- customers, especially technical customers, even if those technical customers are early adopters and generally positive on the idea of the special sauce you claim to be adding, are much more critical than investors. At least until the investors understand what the customers are saying.
- rpdillon 4mo agoThis is pretty great, in the sense that I'm now very aware I should avoid Flux.ai at all costs, and should recommend to others that they do the same.
- mbonnet 4mo agonow I have a moral reason (in addition to clear engineering reasons) to never use Flux!
- ncr100 4mo agoIMO it is the management that made the decision - the people in charge are the interesting "never partner with" people, again IMO.
- taco_emoji 4mo agoFirst I'm hearing of flux.ai and now my opinion of them is entirely negative because they hate free speech!
- allthetime 4mo agoI'm sure they love free speech, except for the kind that reveals how shitty their product is
- giancarlostoro 4mo ago> Adafruit accessed only information that Flux’s own systems made publicly available through a server misconfiguration. Did they access it knowing that there was a server misconfiguration or was this only learned of after the fact? Because Computer Fraud and Abuse is pretty serious.
- dmitrygr 4mo agoDespite the lack of context (as is expected when gangsters like Fenwick and West get involved -- i've gotten letters from them), I will throw my lot in with Adafruit. The people who run Adafruit have been nothing but upstanding and reasonable the entire time that business has existed. I'm willing to bet that they are in the right knowing only that -- it is enough.
- spamizbad 4mo agoI'm not sure if this was Flux, but one of those AI EDA tool companies had a somewhat absurd ad where the narrator stated the AI tool told them a capacitor was being used to block DC, and that's something they never learned while getting an EE degree. Now, I don't have an EE degree, but I feel like how capacitors interact with AC and DC are sort of "passive components 101" that even hobbyists learn quite early on. The EDA space doesn't strike me as being anywhere near as SWE when it comes to AI.
- tagami 4mo agoAre there any AI tools that can create quality PCB work yet?
- teaearlgraycold 4mo agoExtremely embarrassing for my country that this is what the FBI is spending time on.
- dghlsakjg 4mo agoThe FBI isn't involved. A former FBI employee is.
- teaearlgraycold 4mo agoMy bad
- K0balt 4mo agoI tried flux and it was a total waste of time. I get the idea it’s for rank beginners, maybe it’s useful at that level? Honestly, I haven’t seen an autorouter that doesn’t take at least as much time as it takes to do it by hand to sort out the results. But then I’m also not paying thousands for premium tools, so??? I find that with some experience, routing and placement is kinda the fun part..
- lightedman 4mo agoFlux.ai is probably trying to hide the fact their product does not do what it says it does and they're basically scamming you out of your money (won't even refund you for prompts that did not do what they said they would do.) The entire thing was trash when I tried it two years ago and it's still very much trash now, not even able to do a basic TSOP LED driver without you needing to spend hundreds of dollars to correct its mistakes.
- joshfee 4mo agoFor those interested in leveraging AI to build circuit boards, check out https://tscircuit.com/ https://tscircuit.com/ I have no affiliation to the project, just someone that's done some hobby PCB design in the past and a couple weeks ago was exploring what's available in age of AI. Flux looked expensive and unimpressive. While it definitely burned through some tokens, I was able to get a seemingly functional PCB meeting my design requirements and was able to iterate on it using my existing Claude code subscription. I did use Gemini for some of the initial design research and parts selection since I find its search a bit better, but was overall impressed. I think with some tuning of the Claude skills to have it do a bit less guess-and-check it could be a nice workflow. Definitely better than the either really dated or really expensive PCB design tools in the market.
- Courty 4mo agoHow about doing it properly and without a bunch of poor design decisions ?
- hbwang2076 4mo ago[flagged]
- Courty 4mo agoThis whole think is crazy. We’re being expected to pay to develop their tools which quite frankly are fairly poor. I’m sure at some point they will get better but like the AI code, its volume over quantity. Code and PCB design is part science and part art. The AI boy do neither well. I have had several frustrating sessions trying to explain a simple concept to it and burning through tokens to do something an intern would be able to do in an hour. For code it’s a good sounding board and for PCB’s it’s a waste of a good designers time. And if you point this out? A desist letter.. that says to me they know the systems are floored, buggy and not value for money..