Inspecting the board
describe_board_view
Report what a board image would contain, without rendering it.
Usage
describe_board_view [options…]Angle brackets mark required arguments and square brackets optional ones. Available in the pcb editor. You can issue this yourself, and the AI agent issues the identical command — there is no second, hidden interface.
Arguments
options0 required, 1 optional.
Behaviour
Read-only, text-only, cheap. Returns the content bounds, which layers actually carry content, which item classes are present with counts, the grid step and pixel size a render would use, and the net names available to highlight. Call this FIRST: it costs a few dozen tokens and tells you whether an image is worth requesting, which layers are non-empty, and which classes you can drop. A layer not listed here has nothing on it — rendering it wastes an image on an empty picture.
How the agent uses it
- The agent works in a perceive / act / verify / recover loop: it describes the design, issues
describe_board_viewor another command, checks the result, and undoes the change if the check fails. - Commands report what they actually did. A refusal is a result, not a silent no-op — which is what lets the agent recover instead of building on a change that never happened.
- Anything the agent can do here, you can do yourself, and the reverse.
Other inspecting the board
Try describe_board_view in the editor
Free to start on macOS, Windows and Linux. Bring your existing KiCad and Altium libraries.