Directing an AI Agent Through Production RTL, Not Just Autocomplete

What changes when you point an autonomous coding agent at real chip sign-off work instead of boilerplate — and what 20+ iterations on a production ISP module actually looked like.

Most "AI writes my code" stories are about scaffolding, tests, or glue code — places where being wrong is cheap and instantly visible. Chip RTL sign-off is the opposite: a subtle logic error can survive simulation, survive code review, and only surface as a silicon bug months after tape-out. I wanted to know whether an agentic coding tool (ChipAgents, directed the same way I'd direct a junior engineer) could actually clear that bar on a real production block, not a toy example.

The answer was yes — but only once I stopped treating it like autocomplete and started treating it like delegation to someone who needed explicit checkpoints, not just a prompt.