[frontiersummit]

As someone who has used 3D CAD professionally for decades, I must confess I had low expectations for this tool. My expectations have been greatly exceeded, and there is real value in something like this.

The value is not in creating models of new/custom parts, but in quickly generating models of standard parts such as pipe fittings, bolts, connectors, and stuff you could buy from a catalog. Prompts like "m4 cap screw which is 50 mm long" or "2 inch ASME B16.5 pipe flange" seem to reliably generate adequate results. Design of large assemblies often requires locating or drawing dozens (or hundreds) of such models (though there are sometimes libraries available). It's almost like the model was trained on the entire McMaster-Carr catalog! (maybe they scraped it?) The models will still need to be checked to ensure quality, but this is true regardless of whether a human or AI creates them.

Modeling even simple fixtures and brackets with a system like this is cumbersome: I tried, but requires paragraphs of metes-and-bounds language. Nevertheless I got the parts I wanted. Much of engineering happens at the interfaces, so accurately describing things like hole patterns and mating surfaces is critical. This can certainly be done in text, just not time-efficiently.

Additionally, the output (STEP files, etc) are what we call in the business "dumb solids." They don't include any parametric logic, and the sorts of edits which can be made to them are limited and often require serious creativity.

Another drawback: this thing is slow! A good CAD user could draw a lot of these parts in less wall-clock time. I assume this can be overcome by throwing more iron at the problem.

The UI/UX is has a ton of rough edges (and I'm still not sure if I made an account or not) but is totally fine for a proof-of-concept.

I went into this with incredibly low hopes: I've heard many promises of software which promises to make CAD faster and easier and accessible to non-experts. These look great in sales pitches, but the engineers and designers in the audience invariably wince (or worse). This is something that I could actually use and would make my life easier.

[jessfraz]

This is good feedback thank you! The model will only get better from here and we will work on speed and UX, we are also getting a bit pounded at the moment which might account for some slowness.

[jessfraz]

Also the goal is ultimately to return a KCL file which is our scripting language for CAD which is very parametric :) and easily editable, this will come next year

[aredox]

The value of a ML model for this is fairly low, though. An expert model, with fuzzy matching if needed, is going to be far more reliable for "standard" parts.

The only value of a "generative" model would be for "creating models of new/custom parts", but that's what you explicitely say it isn't for...

This ML/AI fad is looking more and more like the blockchain fad: redoing exactly what we already know how to do with boring technologies, but repackadged in a shinier coat hiding worse results, and the unproven promise of just-around-the-corner progress to suck in investors.

[BillyTheMage]

I'm sure there are instances where you have to model these parts manually, but I've never run into a situation where McMaster-Carr[1] didn't have the models I'm looking for.

- [1]: https://www.mcmaster.com/

[pottertheotter]

Being able to output parametric models would be amazing. Much less interesting otherwise.