When AI agents write large parts of an embedded or hardware system, the one thing that used to make the work tractable disappears: a single engineer holding the complete model of the system in their head. Simulation-driven development is a methodology that relocates that model out of the engineer's head and into a software simulation that reproduces the target hardware's interfaces and behaviour one-to-one, with no mocks — then lets a gated, multi-layer agent pipeline build, test, and repair against it.
The method rests on four ideas:
- Handoffs are lossy. Every model-to-model handoff compresses the shared context, exactly as in human communication. The pipeline is built to minimize and contain that loss.
- No mocks, ever. Instead of approximating a peripheral, the real compiled driver is loaded and exercised through true one-to-one transactions.
- Progress is key-gated. A producing agent can never grant its own advance — only an independent reviewer may issue the key.
- Two stages. A software simulation first, then on-device simulation in which the pipeline controls power, reset, inputs, and even watches the screen through a framebuffer dump and a camera, with a hardware watchdog that can recover a wedged device.
The result is a development loop whose value grows with iteration: the more it runs, the more defects are caught before they ever reach silicon.
Not a flat pool of agents but a managed tree: the human-owned architecture at the root, an orchestrator that plans and delegates, and dedicated teams beneath it. Every agent has a single, narrow responsibility.
A control microcontroller drives the device under test (buttons, boot, reset, high-side power kill); one MCU serializes the display framebuffer (intended image) and another captures the panel with a camera (actual image); a capacitor-discharge watchdog on an isolated rail power-cycles a wedged device.
What is controlled, observed, recovered, built, flashed, and reviewed on the device side — and which role owns each.
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├── simulation_driven_development.pdf # the full paper
├── Figures/ # all rendered figures (PNG)
└── README.md
Nils Achermann
Developed by passion, fueled by mate.