Very cool! Can you reveal how much this custom board cost you?

I built a project nearly identical to this one so knowing the level of complexity required, I'm not surprised it worked. AI is indeed raising the floor. Even simple hobby designs were once out of reach, but now we can "YOLO it and build stuff fast without necessarily knowing about the details" as the author puts it.

That said, without experience it's easy to pierce the veil of "simple circuitry" by accident, just like in XKCD: Tasks[1].

Looking at preview of the author's next project at the end of the article, I'm not so sure the same strategy will work. The board is probably two orders of magnitude more complex. Without knowing the circuit details, I see many red flags (randomly placed ics and decoupling, likely wrong length matching, random thick traces indicating lack of foresight on power distribution, backwards connectors, the probably unnecessary use of BGA footprints, etc).

[1]: https://xkcd.com/1425/