How the Zap! logo came to be
"How about a logo like this? Feel free to make color variations, but I want keep that lightning-feel to it"
Launching Zap! 1.1:
A whopping 3.7x reduction in unconnected counts over 50 previously unseen boards + MCP & large board (2000+ pads) support
I'm sorry guys, but Zap is so much better that we need a new benchmark for this. Human level routing is within reach
v1.1 is a leap towards automated PCB manufacturability. The router is smart and adheres to JLC's DFM constraints. Order blocking JLC findings is down by 8.7x on boards it never saw
Hardware will become very much software like in the near future. Prototyping will become extremely cheap, and anyone CAN BUILD anything they want
What do you think will remain as moat for consumer electronics products?
50%manufacturing know-hows
42%real-world deployment
0%branding
8%certification costs
12 votes • Final resultsIntroducing Zap!
Zap! is an lightning-fast autorouter built to take down AI PCB dev cycle from days to minutes.
After parting ways with my co-founder @MrPorkchop720 the company was met with a crisis of having to deliver AnchorCam Stereo (our main product) with no hardware engineers.
I searched all over SF, Shenzhen, and Seoul but could not find engineering firms that could deliver production quality egocentric cameras that meets our exact specifications. I was afraid to tell to the customers about this situation - all I could do in the meanwhile was assemble off-the-shelf boards from partnering companies.
But now with Zap! I can iterate on the boards myself without hand-routing - after Zap! is done the AI agents are usually able to fix the remaining issues through finishing touches. I actively use it to get AnchorCam Stereo production ready, and hope it enables many more to aim for larger problems that can only be solved through new hardware.
You can compare Zap!'s performance with other popular routers in the link - it does really well.
I am also working on an automated placer, so stay tuned for the next launch. I'll let you know when AnchorCam Stereo becomes available. To those who ordered and are still waiting, I greatly appreciate your patience and will get back to you as soon as we get our first fully working samples.
Although Alex left the company, we remain good friends - he will be launching something exciting soon too, so shoutout to him @MrPorkchop720
- Yejun
Replying to @mmmutantQ @MrPorkchop720
Guys, there were some update to the numbers. For the numbers shown now, all routers were run on single-core and given 60 minutes. Will be coming back with multi-core results + updating the page later! Google log in coming soon, if you need api key for test dm me
Zap! your ratsnest at zap.mutual.solutions
Replying to @abijahkaj @MrPorkchop720
Yes, Zap! has a plain HTTP REST API. zap.mutual.solutions/docs if you need it! right now the login is under construction so I can provide you api key through dm if you want to test now
can't imagine what world we will be living in 12 months from now
Dusting off this tweet from April because this gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is *widening*. It's now less "two groups of people speaking past each other" and more a sharp funnel.
- Napkin math somewhere around 6B people (~75% of the population) have barely come in contact with LLMs at all.
- Around 1-2B (~20%) are casual and infrequent users of free-tier ChatGPT-like products. This group sees derpy chatbots and treats them a bit like a better Google search, a writing aid, or etc. Maybe an agent tries to book you a flight. I have non-tech friends who (reasonably, imo) say they have not much use for it at all. Even many professionals outside of math&code are in this tier. For example, execs and many other functions spend a lot of their time talking to other people, so while they understand what is happening intellectually, it is still second-hand and a bit abstract.
- Now we get to professional use of frontier-grade LLMs in math&code. Somewhere around 20M people (0.2%) see first-hand that large, complex projects that used to take them weeks/months can now be completed by agents with a prompt. Building apps, copying apps, translating apps, decompiling apps from binaries... This has all happened very quickly and recently - less than 1 year ago, I was writing code manually by hand, typing memorized computer code commands into a code editor character by character, occasionally pressing Tab to autocomplete a little chunk of code.
- And finally we get to the ~5,000 people (~0.00006%) with access to frontier-grade systems internally. The external world has seen the preview. It looks like swarms of thousands of agents collaborating over weeks on software mega projects: minting zero days, running cyber attacks and defenses at machine speeds, discovering new science, advancing the frontier of mathematics. Things that would have taken top professionals in the industry years of work. Meanwhile, human review and comprehension are starting to fall behind. For example, people are still involved in the "archeology" of the OpenAI-HF incident from many months ago. Mathematicians may be poring over the 722 manuscripts on frontier mathematics for a while.
The funnel is driven by a combination of factors:
1. The impact scales with ambition, problem size, and horizon. A question with a paragraph answer barely stresses the system. You need a reservoir of big, difficult problems that you really care about. This aspect drives the consumer / professional dimension of the funnel.
2. The jaggedness of the system (which I have written about a lot separately). Capability peaks in domains that are digital, verifiable and economically valuable. This is because LLM capability emerges from reinforcement learning on verifiable rewards on a curated environment mixture driven by revenue potential. This aspect primarily drives the area (e.g. math&code) dimension of the funnel.
3. Access. Free-tier, paid-tier, internal.
So this is the weirdness of the moment. The general public has mostly not interacted with these systems. When they have, it looks like a derpy chatbot. The majority of professionals still see only a modest uplift. And a small sliver of professionals are experiencing the vertigo of the curve going vertical. And it is all happening at the same time.

















