[HN Gopher] Open-sourcing circuit tracing tools
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Open-sourcing circuit tracing tools
Author : jlaneve
Score : 57 points
Date : 2025-05-29 17:16 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.anthropic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.anthropic.com)
| Eduard wrote:
| thought this was about PCB tracing and was disappointed.
| dvh wrote:
| If you only want to trace veroboards (stripboards) and not full
| blown PCBs I made a browser tool for that:
| https://github.com/dvhx/stripboard2schematic
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| By total coincidence I have a project at the prototype stage
| that I will be building (hopefully starting tonight) on a
| strip board. Thanks!
| buescher wrote:
| You and me both. The reverse engineering tools are out there
| even if most of the search results are AI slop that recommends
| common layout tools. If I really needed the work done though
| I'd just pay one of the overseas services and clean up from
| there.
| AdamH12113 wrote:
| Yeah, I actually have a decades-old two-layer board that I need
| to reproduce and I would love to be able to feed images of it
| into some sort of tool and have it generate a schematic (or at
| least a netlist) automatically.
| duskwuff wrote:
| It's not automatic, but one way I've seen people reverse-
| engineer PCBs (and ICs!) is to import scans of the subject in
| Kicad, then start tracing out the connections on screen.
| 1wheel wrote:
| It can be! Here's a circuit showing how the model processes
| "PCB tracing stands for" to output "printed":
|
| https://www.neuronpedia.org/gemma-2-2b/graph?slug=pcb-tracin...
| tacker2000 wrote:
| haha same here
| forgotpwagain wrote:
| thought this was about tracing neural circuits in the brain and
| was disappointed.
| Tostino wrote:
| This type of stuff is really important in my opinion. Getting
| this type of stuff open sourced allows academics and other
| researchers to try and do this type of interpretability research
| on a more level playing field.
|
| I think the more people looking at this the better. I have a
| feeling there will be some breakthroughs in identifying important
| circuits and being able to make more efficient model
| architectures that are bootstrapped from some identified
| primitives.
| sanex wrote:
| The conversation about this on Dwarkesh was interesting and I'm
| glad we're getting access to the tool.
|
| https://open.spotify.com/episode/3H46XEWBlUeTY1c1mHolqh?si=L...
| rob-olmos wrote:
| Anthropic employees Sholto Douglas & Trenton Bricken did an
| interview recently with Dwarkesh Patel, pieces here and there was
| about the circuit tracing insights.
|
| https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/sholto-trenton-2 -- search the
| transcript for "circuit" for the quick bits.
|
| Eg, "If you look at the circuit, you can see that it's not
| actually doing any of the math, it's paying attention to that you
| think the answer's four and then it's reasoning backwards about
| how it can manipulate the intermediate computation to give you an
| answer of four."
|
| https://transformer-circuits.pub/
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