Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- I find all current LLMs to have pretty poor spatial awareness. It is becoming better, but still very poor. How are you dealing with that? Got any special tricks, any advice?by murkt
- No matter how much I’ve experimented with similar text-to-image projects including this one - the LLMs still don’t fully understand the visual feedback loop, and the results are far from what expected. And it doesn’t matter how the task is described, whether there’s a reference, or even if there’s a part of a finished model that just needs to be integrated into another component - the resulting models may be visually close to what is required, but they are not technically accurate.by dmpanch
- https://modelrift.com/blog/openscad-llm-benchmark/ LLMs are still weak at spatial reasoning, but it gets better. Check out modelrift.com for another alternativeby jetter
- Is CADAM also what's used for the commercial product adam.new? How did you manage to write all those plugins? If it is also CADAM isn't stuff getting lost in the Fusion/Solidworks/Onshape -> OpenSCAD -> back process? Do constraints and everything just seamlessly import/export?
Some comments here mention tolerances/functional requirements. Do you think the LLM/screenshot loop will scale to that too? Maybe rendering subassemblies individually until they make sense? Still feels like a full functioning V8 engine block needs _a lot_ of ghost-view screenshots to verify it works. What's your thoughts on a "simulation" approach, since it's not aligned with your bitter-lesson-blog-post?
Are you able to reveal more about what kind of traction you have? 10s/100s/1000s of companies?
Very cool open source project, and thanks for sharing so much!
by Doerge - I'm pretty skeptical of AI products, but your onboarding and first design experience has been pretty awesome. I will definitely spend a bit more time experimenting with thisby dgellow
- Congratulations on the launch. The propeller demo looks good :) BTW, customising gears (which are then laser cut from sheet metal) is also a common request from untechnical people who need CAD help.
How do you differentiate from other open source AI CAD solutions? I’ve also had a good experience with Claude Code and CadQuery, which is a Python toolkit for generating CAD designs based on OpenCascade. I.e. what’s your moat?
And given that you’re YC funded .. what’s your plan for millions in MRR?
I’m asking because I would like to launch some useful open source tools myself (but for PIM, not CAD) and I just can’t figure out how to make open source sustainable, let alone profitable enough for hockey stick revenue growth. Any tips? Book recommendations?
by fxtentacle - Can it work from photos? I'm specifically thinking about stuff like this:by criddell
- It did a great job with this prompt. Got it done in about the time it would take me to login and load Fusion. I forgot to include the wire diameter but it made a reasonable assumption and included it in the params for edits
"Make a grommet seal for a hole in an aluminum pipe where a cable goes through. The hole is 0.48 inches in diameter. The wall of the pipe is .25 inches thick. Make the seal split so it can be installed with the cable in place. Make a circular cover lip that is .2 inches across on the outside, and an inner lip to secure it that is smaller. It will be printed in flexible tpu"
by patja