Why AI agents struggle with chip design (RTL) debugging, and what helps
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Ranked by a public rubric, not by votes: what a comment adds counts, not who wrote it. How comments are ranked · Comment rules
Summary
Booley's author, boldaxolotl, ran a case study with Claude Code on a reintroduced forwarding bug in the VeeR EL2 RISC-V core inside Caliptra. The agent found the faulty line within about five minutes either way, but reproducing the bug took far longer. Adding waveform search, blocking simulation calls and file-based build configuration cut mean time to a verified fix from 55.8 to 21.3 minutes over ten trials each. The author built the tool and ran the test, and the study covers one bug, one design and one model.