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- Hacker News
- 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 ?
by lepouet - 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!
by zachdive - Obligatory 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 you design a complex assembly, every change to that part needs to be aware of the other parts in the design -- thus you need a global part-aware editing capability from diffusion.
That's getting solved already in china leading labs, and bottlenecked by the lack of good training data, which china is solving with mass labor.
This will be solved overseas first before we will in the US.
by XiZhao - They're defo getting better at spatial reasoningby zachdive
- You made me remember my first year of computer enginering where we had cad classes and every test was extremelly difficult because teacher used to ask the exactly wight with 6 decimals places and the correct material. If you miss one decimal all the answer was wrong.by joao_sobhie
- 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.by jwr
- 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 clearerby zachdive
- Looks 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."
by Momentusdot - Been following you guys a while, seems like you've been gaining some traction recently, lets goo and congrats!
I have been working on GrandpaCAD[0] for a while, a very similar product. I thought of you as my biggest competitors but noticed recently you are focusing more and more on professionals while I am focusing on total noobs in modeling who just want to whip out a quick model. So I guess we are not competitors anymore?
My evals[1] show that Opus 4.7 and GPT 5.5 are very comparable in terms of generation quality, but GPT 5.5 is slower and costs sooo much more in my harness. And the original breakthrough model was Gemini 3.1. I'm curious do you have more written about your benchmarks setup?
If you want to chat email is in my profile. Btw, just met "your"(?) neighbour on a plane a couple of days ago. World is small.
[1]: https://grandpacad.com/en/blog/public-benchmarks-misled-me-o...
by ponyous - Lol which neighbour? That's so randomby zachdive
- Following this with interest - I'm an ex-SolidWorks AE and was recently trying to use FreeCAD (which I didn't get on with as it's very different to what I'm used to).
I found a FreeCAD MCP which I was driving with Claude Code and got mixed results. I was using it to do the tedious task of matching up a PCB design with specific LED positions to an enclosure design (having built a little util to design KiCAD PCBs using Claude https://github.com/edcs/kicad-yaml).
I've moved back to OnShape now, so it's great to see a new tool out there which connects to the tools I'm used to.
by edcs - If 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 would not be very difficult for PTC to add an Onshape co-pilot that calls the Claude Agent SDK, while PTC can also build more powerful internal tools/MCP servers for their own use without exposing them to external API users.
by little_cad - 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.
by idank - I'd love something like this for FreeCAD.by nickthegreek
- We can build this!by zachdive
- Mechanical 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 renaming does look very useful)
by vablings - The real way to use AI with CAD is to have it generate macros or scripts that interact with your tree or model.by MisterMower
- Hello, the feature tree renaming can be done with scripting macros in nearly every major CAD software (i.e. CATIA, Creo, Solidworks, Inventor).
AI in CAD are solutions searching for a problem... :/
by grp - 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).by lucasgerads
- 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.by jrflo
- Isn't AutoLISP the traditional answer here?
Or these days, Dynamo?
by WillAdams - Could be camera and canvas to CAD - be more apt for your use case? Something akin to minority report + AI?
Asking seriously.
Context: Have some overlapping interest in the space because I am prototyping a camera based edge device that allows for AR/AI interactions.
by fillskills - Completely agree and we're exploring a number of modalities. You can actually select edges, faces and specific features to give that context to the model.
It is quite impressive putting in a raw prompt and watching the model just one-shot it though: https://x.com/adamdotnew/status/2050264512230719980?s=20
by zachdive - 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 complex projects that doesn’t involve me forcing a whole team to go all in on some stupid PaaS. A tip for founders: if you’re adding steps to the work process, you’re not helping.
- 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 applicable), uses measurement tools to validate the design, provide material details for FEA, read and use PDF drawings/datasheets, and so on.
At least, that’s the theory. The problem is that none of the existing CAD tools (almost all exclusively built on Parasolid) are set up to support agentic workflows. None have proper text based representations, with the possible exception of OnShape’s feature script which is too undocumented and proprietary to be of much use. Even if it was supported, Parasolid isn’t set up to provide the kind of detailed error reporting needed to provide agent feedback.
I’ve been experimenting with this in ECAD by giving agents the ability to edit Altium files directly and it’s been working very well (even with footprint drawings!), but my attempts to do it with MCAD have fallen flat on their face because it’d require developing a geometric kernel from scratch with this workflow in mind.
by akiselev