atopile officially supports VSCode and Cursor. We recommend using Cursor. AI is already getting very good at writing ato code. Download it here: https://www.cursor.com/ Once you have VSCode/Cursor just install the atopile VSCode/Cursor extension. atopile extension After installation it will prompt you to install the ato CLI. Click the Install Automatically button. atopile extension install

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Installing KiCAD

If you want to layout or route PCBs you will need to install KiCAD. 
brew install kicad
Ultimately, atopile is a Python package, so you can install it wherever and however you want—but some Python package managers are better than others. Here’s the recommended method to install atopile. 
brew install atopile/tap/atopile
  1. Install uv. See: https://docs.astral.sh/uv/getting-started/installation/
  2. Install atopile with uv 
    uv tool install atopile
    If this is the first time you’ve used uv for a tool install, it might give you another command to run to finish setup.Do it.
  3. Check ato installed 
    ato --version

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Editable installation (Best for development)

  1. Install uv See: https://docs.astral.sh/uv/getting-started/installation/
  2. Clone the repo 
    git clone https://github.com/atopile/atopile
  3. cd into the repo 
    cd atopile
  4. Install 
    uv sync --dev