🔌 Bring your own AI
At a recent industry event, I learned about Lattice Prompt. This tool spins up a local MCP server. You can connect to it from any AI tool, such as Claude, which then drives the Lattice FPGA design tools.
I like the approach Lattice took. Their tool lets you bring your own AI rather than bundling AI into their product. Why does this matter? The difference is easy to miss, but it matters:
- Bundled tools can only operate in the Lattice environment.
- Bring-your-own tools can also operate on everything else you do: documentation, specs, PCB design, software, etc.
With isolated tools, a person still acts as the interface between them. Allowing an external agent to operate across multiple tools greatly expands its power. This is where Metcalfe’s law comes into play: a network’s value grows with the square of its nodes, or in our case, the number of tools working together. With AI, there is probably another multiplier on top of that.
In my work, local files and tools are where AI delivers the most, because the tools and context are close at hand and fast. As a result, the cycle time is much shorter.
