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Been very impressed with my most recent project. I wanted to simulate some older electronics circuits. I handed it a folder with scans of old service manuals which contained circuit diagrams. It managed to correctly interpret the circuits, including figuring out some were the same topology despite the diagrams being quite different, or some that had some subtle but very important differences despite looking almost identical at a glance.

In a few cases it asked me to check some subcircuits and some component values because it couldn't read it right. So instead of just making things up it deferred to me.

It also ran tons of small simulation experiments while doing this to verify claims from the service manual, like that the RC filter it had read off the schematics actually had a cutoff frequency that was sensible in relation to some bandwidth number in the manual.

I had uploaded datasheet PDFs for many of the ICs and it used those to cross-reference and validate.

It kept on working for over an hour. When it asked for the manual verification, I described circuit connections in words, like "from pin 3 on IC 2 there's a series resistor of 3k in parallel with a 10 pF capacitor, it then connects to a 18k resistor to ground, a reverse-biased diode to ground, and then finally into pin 6 of IC 4", and it correctly understood the topology in all the cases. Sometimes it asked me to check again because it though something was off, and indeed I had mis-read the schematics.

I also provided reference articles on the underlying theory. Scannded stuff from the 40s and 50s. It correctly read the equations and cross-validated them across papers, and even caught several typos along the way.

I barely had to do anything apart from providing the PDFs and some occasional manual schematic interpretation.

Claude 5.5 on High. Burned through about 50% of my weekly $20 subscription usage, but I didn't try to optimize much.

I did use Sonnet 5.5 Medium on some datasheets and it also did very well on the extraction, but did have to correct itself more often on the conclusions.