When Generalist Models Fail: The Rise of Specialized AI for Hardware Engineers

Generalist LLMs consistently fail in specialized domains—Claude hallucinates SPICE syntax, GPT-4 suggests non-existent microcontroller peripherals, and Gemini confuses CAD tools. FineFab's open-source pipeline solves this through a routed mixture-of-experts architecture with 35 domain-specific LoRA stacks, preserving disciplinary expertise that monolithic fine-tuning would destroy. This represents a fundamental shift: production AI systems for technical work require specialization, not generalization.