Adafruit Receives Demand Letter from Fenwick Legal Counsel on Behalf of Flux.ai

hi 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

Adafruit 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.

As 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.

Flux 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...

This 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.

Note 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.

Had 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

hi 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.

Looks 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.

From 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.

I 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.

Struck a nerve, but I wouldn’t back down. If they do take you to court, there’s this wonderful thing called discovery.

I was surprised they didn't publish the text of the demand letter verbatim.

> 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.

I love the transparency that Adafruit is proving on this.

What's the context here?

> Adafruit’s reporting concerns a matter of public security interest and was conducted in the ordinary course of responsible disclosure

Never 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_fl...

²) https://www.flux.ai/sitemap/manufacturers/adafruit

I previously had a passing interest in Flux, now I'm certain it's a fraud.

Had anyone tried AutoPCB (https://autopcb.app/) instead?

Seems especially useful when paired with an agentic coding tool!

I hadn’t even heard of flux.ai til now. Going to give it a spin tonight.

Flux.ai offers a PCB design solution which is a clear interest for Adafruit. Anyone have any idea what this is about?

For 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.

Suing the industry won't win them customers/friends.

Why 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.

They lost me at subscription hell. Thanks, won’t touch this shit with a ten foot pole.

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>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