Rivet PCB is live today · enclosure and assembly in build

From an idea to the thing at your front door.

Rivet is one workspace where the enclosure, the circuit board and the assembly are the same model — driven by an agent that reports what it did not check, so nothing reaches a factory on a guess.

See what runs today → What is built, honestly

The board editor is real and you can drive it now. The enclosure and assembly surfaces are in build — we held August's launch rather than ship them apart. The ledger below names exactly what runs and what does not.

The thesis

Nobody owns the seam. The seam is where the work is.

Building a physical product means driving three tools that do not share a model: one for the enclosure, one for the board, one for assembly and for ordering the parts. Every handoff is manual re-entry, and the handoffs are where projects die — the board that does not fit the case, the connector facing the wrong way, the part that was never orderable.

Altium, Fusion, SolidWorks, KiCad and the new AI-native tools are each good at the discipline they chose. None of them holds all three at once. Rivet is the bet that the combination is the product and the pieces are not.

one model Enclosure · CAD Board · PCB Assembly · BOM the handoffs are not files — there are no handoffs

Why you would trust it

A tool that can say “I did not check this.”

The reason AI has not taken over hardware design is not intelligence. It is that the file formats cannot check themselves, so a model produces geometry that looks right and is wrong, with no way to tell the two apart.

A linter says error, warning, info. All three mean I looked. None of them can say I did not look, and I know it. In Rivet, UNMODELED is a first-class severity: the verifier is the language server, and its blind spots are reported rather than hidden.

It is slower to build than features are. It is also the only part that cannot be skipped, because the moment a design tool tells an engineer “ready to manufacture” and is wrong once, it is never believed again.

The Rivet agent panel: a turn of work on a board, with the tools it called listed
The agent panel in Rivet PCB. 40 tools — 19 read-only, 21 that need confirmation because they change the design or the view. Every change is a named, reviewable step.

Running today

The board editor is real. You can drive it.

Rivet PCB is the first of the three surfaces: schematic and board, footprints read straight out of the standard KiCad library, design-rule checks, copper pours generated in the shape a fab would actually etch, and a 3D view of the finished board. It is the piece of the vision that is far enough along to be shown.

The Rivet PCB board editor with a routed board, layer inspector and agent rail
Rivet PCB, board editor. Real screenshot — not a mock. Open the product site →

August 2026

Why we held the launch.

We set out to be the first users of our own product. Shipping one component of the vision would not have achieved that — and it would have taught the first users the wrong thing about what Rivet is.

CAD alone is not interesting. PCB alone is not interesting. Assembly alone is not interesting. Them working together is the entire idea, and until we can generate a gadget ourselves and receive it, the magic is not there for us either. It should be stable, it should be reliable, and it should not be sold flawed.

We think that is weeks away, not quarters. We are not there yet, and this page will keep saying so until we are.

The user should be able to sell themselves on what they make.

We are not guessing about hardware. The same three of us built VENDY, a smart vending fridge run by an autonomous agent — paid for out of pocket, iterated 100+ times across four engineering disciplines, destroyed by a gas leak three days before launch, rebuilt, and then 1st out of 80+ projects at Alfaisal University's annual Boeing engineering competition. Rivet is that experience turned into a tool.

The ledger

What is built, and what is not.

Every row here is checkable. If a claim on this page cannot survive someone opening the product and looking, it does not belong on this page.

SurfaceStateWhat that means
Board · PCB Running Schematic and board editors, the standard KiCad footprint and symbol libraries, DRC, copper pours, 3D board render.
Agent surface Running 40 tools — 19 read-only, 21 gated behind confirmation — rebuilt over six adversarial review rounds so a model can drive the editor without silently breaking a design.
Geometry kernel Running C++ kernel with a contract per milestone, checked against an independent OCCT oracle and licensed STEP reference parts.
Accounts & billing Built, closed Stripe checkout, customer portal, per-device grants revocable on the next request. Deliberately not opened to the public — 0 users, $0 revenue.
Enclosure · CAD In progress The kernel is ahead of the interface. There is no shipping CAD app yet, and no screenshot of one on this page.
Assembly In progress The point where board, enclosure and bill of materials become one object — and the reason the launch was held.
Idea → front door Not yet Ordering a finished design straight through to a fab. This is the promise, and it is the last thing that will be true.

The first build goes to people who want to make one thing.

If that is you, the board editor is open now and it is the surface we will build the rest around. Everything you draw in it is meant to survive into the finished product.

Open Rivet PCB →