The answer is a resounding YES, from me right here. Wait, did you say in the <i>field</i>? Maybe not exactly then.<p>I routed a two-layer PCB (printed circuit board) using a buggy program whose DRC (design rule check) did not catch the fact that a plated through-hole meant went right through an unrelated track in the bottom layer.<p>Yes, and so the couple of boards I had fabbed failed. Now that is not in the field. But it&#x27;s not hard to imagine that such a thing could escape into the field; it&#x27;s almost in the field.<p>I didn&#x27;t catch that until I stuffed one board with all the components.<p>The workaround was to drill out that through hole slightly wider, removing the metal connecting the layers, but leaving plenty of the pad in the correct layer to which that hole belonged.<p>This was not a case of logic not implemented in the DRC, but a bug. I tested the issue by adding such mistakes on purpose, and DRC was flagging them properly.<p>In every other regard, the boards worked perfectly; the fix in the artwork is just to move a track a few millimeters over not to intersect with unrelated through-hole.<p>Of course, the responsibility was mine to check the artwork and not trust the tool.  But then, if you can&#x27;t trust the tool, what good is it? What is the value in a design rule check which fails, say 1% of the time. Does it still increase productivity? I believe that it does, during the development of the artwork. Any time the DRC catches something, it saves you time.  It&#x27;s just that at the very end when you have the thing fabricated, you have to make a couple of passes over it with your own eyes. You don&#x27;t have to be that careful at absolutely every stage of the routing, because the DRC &quot;has your back&quot; (mostly).<p>It&#x27;s the same with compilers. Just because they don&#x27;t catch every error with a diagnostic doesn&#x27;t mean diagnostics aren&#x27;t useful. They are still useful even if they are buggy, in that certain cases of something that requires a diagnostic isn&#x27;t diagnosed.  But then who reads tens of thousands of lines of code to spot where some compiler failed to diagnose an invalid pointer conversion without a cast, you know?