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Show HN: AI CAD Harness

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Re: Show HN: AI CAD Harness

#11

Post by lepouet »

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?

Calls that do NOT count toward API limits:

Calls made with OAuth2 via applications that are publicly available in the Onshape App Store

https://onshape-public.github.io/docs/auth/limits/

So it should be ok ?

Re: Show HN: AI CAD Harness

#12

Post by zachdive »

jwr wrote: post #6

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.

We should do better at clarifying this! So in our opensource web app (https://github.com/Adam-CAD/CADAM), you can generate 3D mesh files by clicking mesh on the prompt box. We dubbed this "creative generations" but it should be clearer

Re: Show HN: AI CAD Harness

#14

Post by zachdive »

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…

Whilst I disagree with you (reasons mentioned in the post above), we actually have done quite a bit of work with OpenSCAD!!

See our opensource text to cad editor: https://github.com/Adam-CAD/CADAM

Re: Show HN: AI CAD Harness

#15

Post by zachdive »

lepouet wrote: post #11
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?

Calls that do NOT count toward API limits: Calls made with OAuth2 via applications that are publicly available in the Onshape App Store https://onshape-public.github.io/docs/auth/limits/ So it should be ok ?

yes!

Re: Show HN: AI CAD Harness

#16

Post by jwr »

zachdive wrote: post #12
jwr wrote: post #6

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.

We should do better at clarifying this! So in our opensource web app ( https://github.com/Adam-CAD/CADAM ), you can generate 3D mesh files by clicking mesh on the prompt box. We dubbed this "creative generations" but it should be clearer

...and what about this harness?

Re: Show HN: AI CAD Harness

#17

Post by mijoharas »

zachdive wrote: post #13
nickthegreek wrote: post #10

I'd love something like this for FreeCAD.

We can build this!

I'd also be interested. Here is a comment from a couple of months ago where I was asking similar (with a link to an mcp that I haven't tried yet)[0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47411437

Re: Show HN: AI CAD Harness

#19

Post by zachdive »

jwr wrote: post #16
zachdive wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should do better at clarifying this! So in our opensource web app ( https://github.com/Adam-CAD/CADAM ), you can generate 3D mesh files by clicking mesh on the prompt box. We dubbed this "creative generations" but it should be clearer

...and what about this harness?

https://x.com/zachdive/status/2050264975781060897?s=20

We abstract pretty much everything down to two simple primitives: CAD as code + visual feedback

Re: Show HN: AI CAD Harness

#20

Post by jrflo »

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.
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