🚀 v0.17.6 is out — faster & lighter routing, a smarter cleanup pass, and an AI planning tab

[drandyhaas]

Hey everyone! 👋

A fresh release just landed — v0.17.6 — and if you've been running 0.17.3 from the Plugin & Content Manager, you've got a lot of catching up to do. Tons has changed under the hood since then, so here's the friendly, no-jargon tour.

📦 How to get it: ✅ Update — v0.17.6 is now live in the official Plugin & Content Manager! Just open Plugin and Content Manager, find KiCad Routing Tools, and hit Update (or Install) — no manual download needed. (If it hasn't shown up for you yet, give the KiCad servers a little time to propagate — or grab KiCadRoutingTools-0.17.6.zip from the Releases page and use Plugin and Content Manager → Install from File….)

Update: a small follow-up, v0.17.7, is now out too — it makes the AI planning tab produce boards identical to the command-line tools (especially for power/ground planes). It's not in the PCM yet, so grab that one from the Releases page for now. Details in the v0.17.7 announcement.

⚡ The router got faster and lighter

• Routing now uses noticeably less memory. The search was rebuilt so it stops keeping duplicate copies of everything it explores, and it hands freed memory back to your system as it works. Big, dense boards are much kinder to laptops now.
• A whole pile of speedups — plane repair, fanout, cleanup, and the gnarliest searches all got quicker.
• Differential pairs route far more reliably: better through tight corners, smarter layer changes, automatic polarity-swap detection, and GND stitching vias for clean return paths.
• Fanout (escaping BGA / QFN pins) is much sturdier — rotated BGAs, corner pins, and your choice of escape style (auto / channel / under-pad).
• A neat new cleanup step that basically asks KiCad "what's still disconnected?" and then goes and routes exactly that — it noticeably bumps how many nets actually finish connected, and sweeps up leftover orphan copper.
• Loads of accuracy fixes so the built-in checks agree with what KiCad itself thinks — fewer phantom warnings, fewer missed real ones.

🖥️ The GUI got friendlier

• The Fanout tab now lets you pick an escape method and shares your layer preferences.
• Plane tools are safer and tidier.
• "Reset to defaults" actually restores the real defaults now, and a handful of settings were lined up so the checkboxes behave the way you'd expect.
• General polish — clearer status bar, sensible dividers, nicer dialogs that filter to the right file types.

🤖 The Claude tab (AI planning)

This is the fun one. There's a Claude tab that can look at your board and plan out a whole routing strategy for you — what to fan out, how to handle the diff pairs and planes, the cleanup — as a series of steps you can read over and run.

• Save & load your plans, so a workflow that nailed one board is reusable on the next.
• Pick the model and effort level you want it to think with.
• Every step fully spells out its own settings, so running a plan is predictable and repeatable — no mystery leftover options.

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