Show HN: AI CAD Harness

Post by SauntSolaire » Fri, May 01, 2026, 10:16 PM UTC

contingencies wrote: post #41

donatj wrote: post #36

My friend is an electrical engineer. He designs circuit boards for a living. We were having dinner the other night, and when the topic of AI came up he told me rather confidently that he didn't think AI was coming for his job anytime soon. I kind of cautiously disagreed. He told me that the applications he used had no tooling for AI. I basically said "give it six months". I think in my googling now, it's already here…

People are trying, but it's not here because it's a multi-dimensional problem space where there are local optimums but often no perfect solution and 'good enough' might only be judged through practical testing, integration, or supply chain realities which are at best predictable and often emergent. You can't always foresee why a design will fail until it's 80% done and then you have to go back 20% to solve it another…

Post by varispeed » Sat, May 02, 2026, 12:34 AM UTC

akiselev wrote: post #24

jrflo wrote: post #20

As someone with a background in mechanical engineering, I'd love to be able to automate CAD design as it's quite tedious and only fun like 5% of the time, but I've tried these tools and I really don't think text-to-CAD is the right approach. It usually takes longer for me to come up with an accurate written prompt to fully dimension what I need than to just grab my space mouse and do it.

The real power with these kinds of tools isn’t prompting one shotted models but giving agents the ability to do the full workflow. You give them a description of the part and how it’s supposed to mate with parts from McMaster, Misumi, existing parts libraries, etc and the agent downloads the models, asks any clarifying questions to clear up ambiguities (using available part configurations to provide options when appl…

Post by rambojohnson » Sat, May 02, 2026, 12:47 AM UTC

Post by tamimio » Sat, May 02, 2026, 1:10 AM UTC

Post by contingencies » Sat, May 02, 2026, 1:24 AM UTC

SauntSolaire wrote: post #61

contingencies wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are trying, but it's not here because it's a multi-dimensional problem space where there are local optimums but often no perfect solution and 'good enough' might only be judged through practical testing, integration, or supply chain realities which are at best predictable and often emergent. You can't always foresee why a design will fail until it's 80% done and then you have to go back 20% to solve it another…

Yeah, another way to say it is that the biggest inputs to any complex design aren't actually captured in the board files themselves. Everything you listed are system integration complexities that no level of autorouter will be able to accommodate for, and they make up 80%+ of the work.