Hardware Designer Template now runs proposed KiCad rules against a copy of the actual printed circuit board (PCB) before publishing them in a fabrication review. Its new script assembles every custom rule the publisher would emit, runs KiCad's design rule checking (DRC), the automated pass that finds spacing and connectivity violations, and groups the results by rule.
That matters because a rule can sound correct and still select the wrong geometry. The project had already seen this twice: one rule missed memory-pair net names because their sheet paths changed the match, and another overrode tighter spacing around a ball-grid array package. Running KiCad on the copied board turns those mistakes into counts and named violations while leaving the working design untouched.
The script still exits successfully even when it prints violations, so it is a review aid rather than a continuous integration (CI) gate. The next useful step is a machine-readable expected count per rule; until then, teams adopting this pattern should archive the report and make a human sign off on every nonzero result.