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Show HN: AI CAD Harness

fusion.adam.new

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Show HN: AI CAD Harness

#1

Post by zachdive »

Hi HN, I'm Zach, one of the co-founders of Adam (https://adam.new).

We've been on HN twice before with text-to-CAD/3D experiments [1][2]. The honest takeaway from those threads: prompt-to-3D model web apps are fun, but serious mechanical engineers don't want a black box that spits out an STL. They want help inside the CAD tool they already use, with full visibility and control over the feature tree.

So we built that. Adam is now a harness that integrates directly with your CAD. It reads your parts, understands the existing feature tree, and edits it for you agentically. We are now live in beta on Onshape and Fusion! [3]:

Install link Autodesk Fusion: https://fusion.adam.new/install

Install link PTC Onshape: https://cad.onshape.com/appstore/apps/Design%20&%20Documenta...

Things people are using it for today: - "Merge redundant features and clean up my tree" - "Rename every feature so the tree is actually readable" - "Round all internal edges with a 2mm fillet" - “Parametrize my model” - Along with of course, using Adam to generate CAD end-to-end!

A few things we care about that aren't obvious from the listing:

1. From the start we have always believed in CAD as code as the right abstraction. Our harness leverages Onshape's FeatureScript and Python in Fusion heavily.

2. We run an internal CAD benchmark across frontier models. There has been a massive jump in the spatial reasoning capabilities of recent models, particularly GPT 5.5 and Opus 4.7 [4] [5]

3. We open-sourced our earlier text-to-CAD work [6]

A note on the Anthropic Autodesk connector that shipped a couple days ago [7]: We think it's great for the space and validates the direction.

Where Adam is different: - Model-agnostic. We pick whichever frontier model is winning on each task type from our own internal bench, instead of being tied to one lab. - We live natively in your CAD apps and are actively building integrations across all programs

What would you want an in-CAD agent to do that nothing does today?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44182206

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45140921

[3] https://x.com/adamdotnew/status/2050264512230719980?s=20

[4] https://x.com/adamdotnew/status/2044859329329893376?s=20

[5] https://x.com/adamdotnew/status/2047795078912172122?s=20

[6] https://github.com/Adam-CAD/CADAM

[7] https://x.com/claudeai/status/2049143440508616863?s=20

Show HN: AI CAD Harness
fusion.adam.new

Re: Show HN: AI CAD Harness

#2

Post by cjtrowbridge »

There are more elegant solutions to this problem. Why are you trying to get an LLM to work with bloated, archaic tools that you have to rent from a feudal lord in the cloud when there are free open-source alternatives like OpenSCAD.

This is just one example of a superior tool that's natively easy for LLMs to interact with, because the source files are just composable scripts containing lists of shapes and then lists of tools and parameters to apply to the shapes.

I wrote a simple set of system prompts you can use in any repo to show any LLM how to make SCAD files with a whole bunch of cool examples. This is just another example where walking away from the bloated, inferior feudal system of SaaS and cloud models leads to simpler processes and outcomes with superior results in less time, for free.

https://github.com/cjtrowbridge/vibe-modeling

Re: Show HN: AI CAD Harness

#3

Post by my_username_is_ »

From the OnShape demo videos in the tweets, it looks like sketches are unconstrained. Can this create constraints or other parametric relationships between entities?

And does this use your OnShape API quota? If it's making a new API call for each individual feature, I could see this blowing through the annual quota very quickly. What does this look like in practice?

Re: Show HN: AI CAD Harness

#4

Post by beering »

cjtrowbridge wrote: post #2

There are more elegant solutions to this problem. Why are you trying to get an LLM to work with bloated, archaic tools that you have to rent from a feudal lord in the cloud when there are free open-source alternatives like OpenSCAD. This is just one example of a superior tool that's natively easy for LLMs to interact with, because the source files are just composable scripts containing lists of shapes and then lists…

You won’t be taken seriously if you push OpenSCAD - it’s simply not a tool that professionals will adopt due to not doing Breps. I think the recent progress of FreeCAD and its spin-off libraries cadquery and build123d will be better to push.

Re: Show HN: AI CAD Harness

#5

Post by smrq »

cjtrowbridge wrote: post #2

There are more elegant solutions to this problem. Why are you trying to get an LLM to work with bloated, archaic tools that you have to rent from a feudal lord in the cloud when there are free open-source alternatives like OpenSCAD. This is just one example of a superior tool that's natively easy for LLMs to interact with, because the source files are just composable scripts containing lists of shapes and then lists…

Posing OpenSCAD as an alternative to the likes of Fusion is like posing MS Paint as an alternative to Photoshop. It's not even the same class of tool.

Re: Show HN: AI CAD Harness

#6

Post by jwr »

This looks interesting and promising! But I'm confused about your business model and pricing, which mentions "creative generations"? I'd like to understand it better before investing time into this.

Re: Show HN: AI CAD Harness

#7

Post by zachdive »

my_username_is_ wrote: post #3

From the OnShape demo videos in the tweets, it looks like sketches are unconstrained. Can this create constraints or other parametric relationships between entities? And does this use your OnShape API quota? If it's making a new API call for each individual feature, I could see this blowing through the annual quota very quickly. What does this look like in practice?

We've worked with PTC the last few weeks to up rate limits for our users! They have 10x rate limits so users never hit 429s

As far as sketch constraints go we are currently working on making this robust!

Re: Show HN: AI CAD Harness

#8

Post by rspeele »

cjtrowbridge wrote: post #2

There are more elegant solutions to this problem. Why are you trying to get an LLM to work with bloated, archaic tools that you have to rent from a feudal lord in the cloud when there are free open-source alternatives like OpenSCAD. This is just one example of a superior tool that's natively easy for LLMs to interact with, because the source files are just composable scripts containing lists of shapes and then lists…

In programming the best tools are open source. Nobody is using a closed source compiler anymore, for example. That can lead to an assumption the same is true in every domain. But it's not true. Closed source commercial CAD software absolutely blows the open source stuff out of the water.

OpenSCAD is a cool project and can be useful, but if you believe it's a "superior tool" to professional CAD packages like Solidworks or Fusion360, you must not have used them.

The pro software does things that are impossible or clunky in the OSS alternatives. One I frequently used in SolidWorks: loft with guide curves. SolveSpace and OpenSCAD don't even attempt to support lofts. FreeCAD does but doesn't do guide curves, so you're stuck adding more intermediate profiles to make up for that, and it's horribly easy to get your loft twisted where it's not connecting the right vertices.

Don't get me wrong, I'm very appreciative of the FOSS options, and I do get a lot of use out of them at home for small projects. I especially love SolveSpace, it is beautiful software, well thought out, fast, and its feature set is enough for 80% of my projects. But there are definitely some CAD tasks like designing a car hood or an ergonomic handle, where the FOSS software just doesn't match commercial for modeling capability. And that is not even getting into all the stuff it can do beyond modeling like FEA and CAM.

Re: Show HN: AI CAD Harness

#9

Post by fsloth »

cjtrowbridge wrote: post #2

There are more elegant solutions to this problem. Why are you trying to get an LLM to work with bloated, archaic tools that you have to rent from a feudal lord in the cloud when there are free open-source alternatives like OpenSCAD. This is just one example of a superior tool that's natively easy for LLMs to interact with, because the source files are just composable scripts containing lists of shapes and then lists…

Having worked in CAD for over a decade previously, I think the users want a product surface, and the people paying for the engineers time want a reliable trainable solution that will exist exactly as it is today in five years. They are happy to pay for it in monthly installments.

This is a separate dimension to alternative high quality modeling solutions alone.

Now, some of the users especially are _proud_ of their product specific skill set. They don't _want_ to switch a package.

And - it's much easier to get professional engineers to use extensions to packages their engineering office already uses.

And this comes before any technical side-by-side feature comparison.

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