AI Eval Lab - Live Engineering Assessment Platform

Coding assessments are everywhere, but hardware/EE assessments are rare. This platform streams real CAD tools (like KiCad) to the browser via VNC and uses LLMs to evaluate engineer candidates in real-time on actual design work. Target users are companies hiring hardware engineers and EE professionals.

Hardware hiring is genuinely broken right now — the wave of reshoring, defense tech investment, and EV/semiconductor expansion has created real demand for EE talent assessment tools that don't exist at scale. HackerRank and Codility own the software side but have no credible answer for circuit design, PCB layout, or simulation-based evaluation, which puts this in a mostly uncontested space. The $5k–20k MRR band is plausible given that enterprise ATS and technical screening tools routinely command $500–2k per seat annually, and hardware-hiring companies tend to be fewer but higher-contract-value. The existential risk is the VNC-streaming architecture itself — latency, session stability, and CAD tool licensing create a technically fragile product that could easily consume all engineering capacity just keeping assessments from breaking mid-session, leaving no bandwidth to close deals or improve the LLM evaluation layer.