🧭 v0.17.7 is out — the AI planning tab now routes just like the command line

[drandyhaas]

Hey everyone! 👋

Quick follow-up release — v0.17.7. If 0.17.6 was the big "everything got faster and there's an AI tab now" release, 0.17.7 is the "…and now that AI tab produces the same great boards as the command-line tools" release. Almost all of it is about one thing: making the Claude planning tab and the plane (power/ground) tools behave identically to the tried-and-true command-line workflow.

📦 How to get it: 0.17.7 isn't in the Plugin & Content Manager yet — that update still has to be approved by the KiCad maintainers and propagate out to their servers. For now, download KiCadRoutingTools-0.17.7.zip from the Releases page, then in KiCad open Plugin and Content Manager → Install from File… and pick that zip. (Good news: 0.17.6 should be live in the PCM now — so if you're on an older version you can update to 0.17.6 the normal way, then grab the 0.17.7 zip on top for these fixes.)

🔄 Updated July 11: the v0.17.7 zip was refreshed with faster plane steps, live progress + a working Cancel/Stop, and a reproducibility fix — details in the comment below. If you downloaded earlier on release day, grab it again.

🪄 The planning tab now matches the command line

This is the whole theme of the release. If you ran a routing plan from the Claude tab — especially one with power/ground planes — you could sometimes end up with a board that was a little worse than running the exact same steps by hand on the command line: extra copper, a few more unconnected pads, occasionally even a short. That gap is closed. The GUI now hands the routing engine the same settings the command line uses, step for step, so you get the same result — on our test board, actually a slightly better one (fewer leftover unconnected pads).

If you've only ever used the buttons and never touched a terminal, here's the short version: the AI planner is now as trustworthy as the "official" way to route.

🔌 Power & ground planes got a lot tidier

Planes were where the GUI and command line drifted apart the most, so this is where most of the work went:

• No more phantom shorts from moved capacitors. When the planner nudges decoupling caps to make room, the router now knows exactly where they ended up — so it stops routing to where a cap used to be and shorting against the one that moved.
• Way less redundant plane copper. A subtle default was quietly blocking the little "stitching" connections that tie pads into a plane, which forced the repair pass to pile on a lot of extra copper to compensate. Fixed — plane copper is now lean and matches the command line almost exactly.
• Copper stays a safe distance from the board edge, like the command-line tools have always done — better for manufacturing.
• Planes use the right layers. Connections now prefer the outer and plane layers instead of spilling onto your inner signal layers.
• The plane cleanup pass (trimming dead-end stubs) now always runs in the GUI, just like on the command line.

🎛️ Settings behave the way you'd expect

• Settings no longer "leak" between steps. Each step in a plan now starts fresh with exactly its own settings — a value from an earlier step can't silently carry over and change a later one. (This was the root cause behind several of the plane quirks above.)
• New "Min Track Width" control on the plane-repair options, so you can set how thin the plane-connection traces are allowed to go — and yes, the AI planner can set it too.
• A friendlier plan flow: after you run the steps before planes, the plane step's settings pop up ready for you to eyeball or tweak before you run it, and when a plan finishes it tidies back up for an easy re-run.
• A couple of smarter out-of-the-box defaults so a fresh install just behaves like the command line without you having to know which boxes to tick.

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Under the hood this release also ships a new self-check tool that compares "what the GUI asked the router to do" against "what the command line asks," so this whole class of GUI-vs-command-line drift is caught automatically from here on.

As always, bug reports and feedback are hugely welcome — open an issue or just reply here. Happy routing! 🎉

[drandyhaas]

🔄 Update (July 11): the v0.17.7 download got a nice refresh

We rebuilt the same v0.17.7 release today with a batch of plane-tool improvements that landed right after the announcement. If you downloaded the zip before July 11 in the afternoon (UTC), it's worth grabbing the current one again — same install steps as above. Here's what's new:

⚡ Plane steps are noticeably faster

We profiled the plane create/repair steps on a dense test board and found the connectivity checker (which runs many times behind the scenes) was doing far more work than it needed to on fine plane copper. It's now ~6× faster there, which cut the plane-creation step by about a third on that board. Dense boards benefit the most.

📊 No more "is it frozen?" during plane steps

Plane creation and repair used to go quiet for tens of seconds on dense boards — the window looked hung. Both now report live progress in the status bar and progress gauge: which pad is being stitched (k/N), which plane regions are being reconnected, cleanup, and the final KiCad recheck. The Claude planning tab mirrors all of it while a plan runs.

🛑 Cancel actually cancels

The Cancel button on the Planes tab — and the Stop button on the Claude tab — now interrupt the currently running step at its next safe point, instead of waiting it out. Nothing half-done touches your board: a cancelled step's partial results are discarded, and the plan list marks it [stopped] (and keeps it selected) so you can re-run it later.

🎲 Same inputs, same board — every time

We found and fixed a subtle reproducibility quirk: re-running the exact same plane repair could occasionally produce a slightly different (equally valid, DRC-clean) board, because KiCad's own design-rule checker reports its "unconnected copper" hints at slightly different spots from run to run, and our final reconnect pass followed those hints literally. It now normalizes them first — so identical inputs give you an identical board, which also makes before/after comparisons trustworthy.

Happy routing! 🎉