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Show HN: AI CAD Harness
81–90 of 108 posts
Re: Show HN: AI CAD Harness
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
What's your opinion on FreeCAD's scripting abilities [1]? The link [1] claims > FreeCAD has been designed so that it can also be used without its user interface, as a command-line application. Almost every object in FreeCAD therefore consists of two parts: an Object, its "geometry" component, and a ViewObject, its "visual" component. When you work in command-line mode, the geometry part is present, but the visual par…
There's a lot of alpha to be had in experimenting with LLMS and writing OCCT kernel cad code imo
Re: Show HN: AI CAD Harness
#83Most of the work in vertical agent tooling ends up in shaping the domain APIs, not the model layer. How are you handling errors the model can't recover from? Surfaced as tool errors for retry?
yep! the agents are durable and agent runs self-healing
Re: Show HN: AI CAD Harness
#84As 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.
Worc.dev might be for you. I might call it Jupyter for engineers. Founder is a Mechanical I seem to see one or two of these CAD projects a week. It’s cool, but the real value is design automation specific to my problem domain. Modeling isn’t usually that hard if you’re comfortable with the software. It would probably take as long to just think about what you need. I find more difficulty in maintaining coherence in co…
Big fan of this
Re: Show HN: AI CAD Harness
#85https://zoo.dev/ allows you to re-iterate on the same model over and over with prompts, without resorting to creating a new model from scratch every time.
I'm pretty sure they took that from us. We had the first conversational ux in the space.
Re: Show HN: AI CAD Harness
#86Obligatory mention of https://zoo.dev/ the leader in this space. I will say I explored this reasonably deeply and came away with the conclusion that even though we have OpenSCAD and all these examples, LLMs are still very weak at spatial reasoning compared to diffusion models. You can do all sorts of tricks like have a parts library to get around this and do physics checks but another inconvenient truth is whenever y…
They're defo getting better at spatial reasoning
Re: Show HN: AI CAD Harness
#87Mechanical Engineer here, stop using AI to deal with the most enjoyable part of design PLEASE An automated drafting too where I can describe design intent and requirements would be a million times better, especially if it is CAD context aware. I would say around 5-20% of mENG is not actually modelling, the endless pursuit of text to cad and other ai works is both not helpful and not enjoyable (PS: The feature tree re…
There is definitely some truth to that. I am an EE and have played around with some of the prompt -> schematic tools. If I need 10mins to prompt it to draw the inverting op-amp amplifier circuit that I need. It is pointless. I can draw that in 10s. Also, ECAD software have design blocks and I have a design block libarary. So large parts of a schematic is really just two clicks for me already. If one wants to go into the PCB space with AI, probably the nicest application would be an AI librarian: Enforcing consistency in the parts library, finding datasheets, 3D models, simulation models etc. , listing alternative parts, checking if parts are close to their EOL. This should all be trivial for an AI. Drawing schematics is really a very small part of what an EE does day to day (at least for me).
Re: Show HN: AI CAD Harness
#88If Anthropic starts entering the engineering space, OpenAI and others may follow. The key question is: why would your tool or harness perform better than the frontier model providers’ own native tools, such as Claude for Creative Work, if your product is only a thin layer on top of their model or their agentic system? Similarly, why would your tool work better than a CAD company’s own agentic tool? For example, it wo…
The recipe for these model wrapper companies is 1. enter a space before the big ones do, 2. provide a nice enough wrapper that gets you customers, 3. survive until a bigger fish comes and asks you to join them (or eat you and you die).
Just look at Cursor who is probably the best example you can find. They might have a good outcome in the end, but most get eaten.
Re: Show HN: AI CAD Harness
#89Looks cool.
One task that is always time consuming for a mech design team is generating library parts. Mcmaster carr or other vendor model downloads are one thing, but they never have everything you need, and I don't want a separate model for each and every size/configuration of part. There are still plenty of parts that you can't get a model so have to generate it from scratch using data and pictures from a pdf catalogue.
I want a single model containing all the available configurations of that product.
I just had a go with the Onshape connector to generate such a model of a simple BSPT hex reducing nipple for piping. It looks promising but didn't quite get there and hit the daily token limit while I was trying to get it to fix the model.
FYI when I hit the token limit and click the 'See plans' link, I get "Application error: a client-side exception has occurred."
Re: Show HN: AI CAD Harness
#90If Anthropic starts entering the engineering space, OpenAI and others may follow. The key question is: why would your tool or harness perform better than the frontier model providers’ own native tools, such as Claude for Creative Work, if your product is only a thin layer on top of their model or their agentic system? Similarly, why would your tool work better than a CAD company’s own agentic tool? For example, it wo…
The recipe for these model wrapper companies is 1. enter a space before the big ones do, 2. provide a nice enough wrapper that gets you customers, 3. survive until a bigger fish comes and asks you to join them (or eat you and you die). Just look at Cursor who is probably the best example you can find. They might have a good outcome in the end, but most get eaten.
yes, this is the common recipe. Cursor failed on the text-to-cad copilot first and then pivot to coding copilot and got succeeded there.