[cowlby]

Related: All LLMs have struggled helping me generate OpenSCAD models for 3D printing. They can’t seem to reason through XYZ space and 3D math. It’s my current litmus test for LLM performance.

I have had moderate success describing things as geometric primitives. I.e. making a simple phone stand is hard to one shot. Had to do it in steps as make a plane with XYZ dimensions, rotate it X degrees up, calculate the height using trig, create another plane with that height, translate to X position. Etc.

[owls-on-wires]

This has been my experience also. Curious if this will improve with just more training data, or if another method will need to be introduced.

Building models in code like this is really cool; it’s great to be able to import, for example, a “gears” library and automatically generate the geometry for complex bevel gear setups. I’ve seen this approach used for more than CAD too; there’s a Python library (GDSFactory) for building photonic ICs in code as well, and I’m sure plenty more.

This workflow is a big motivator for my data notebook project (https://mnty.sh/#serenity), since I would like to build everything for a project in code and have visualizers for each component in one notebook.

[Eisenstein]

I found that an MCP server which can render the model and send the image to the LLM helps a lot.

* https://github.com/jabberjabberjabber/openscad-mcp