My reaction to the first comment would be that for more flexibility you could write a Python script to generate the .ato netlist.

Sure.

But that flexibility means that you lose a lot of common constraints that are actually desirable.

We think both are pretty important. For most people, the ato language should be sufficiently powerful, for module designers we have a python interface that allows for more complex designs.

For example the INA228 from TI has a funky addressing scheme that is not possible to describe in ato, so we create a hybrid module:

atopile for the main structure: https://github.com/atopile/packages/blob/multi/adafruit_heis...

compose in an 'addressor' python module: https://github.com/atopile/packages/blob/multi/adafruit_heis...

Above links broken: https://github.com/atopile/packages/blob/main/packages/ti-in... https://github.com/atopile/packages/blob/main/packages/ti-in...