[blobbers]

I agree the central promise of 3D printers was they would get cheaper, better, and more like industrial grade and we would end up with this thing that could build replacement parts for anything in our home.

Instead what we were left with was an endless hunt for 'models', and no companies publishing their specs. Everything had to be done custom, and at best some niche manufacturing for weird side quests like adds ons for OneWheels, or cases for raspberry pis.

The closest thing to practical I have 3D printed is a wedge to better aim my google doorbell. I used to make some beautiful planters. I certainly am not 3D printing a droid, or a dishwasher impeller, or a fan blade for my 30 year old fridge.

So yes, while Claude code is fun, and you can build neat prototypes, it takes a lot of work to build a full product and then maintain it, scale it, deploy it. That takes persistent joy in what you're doing because you're not necessarily claude coding everything.

[tapland]

I've had plenty of use for mine, but I wish I had a library of mechanisms that work well that I could put together to build easily.

Learning modelling is a huge time sink, learning to make threaded parts, or anything modular to not have to re-print everything for changes. It's great but the printing is the easy part

[blobbers]

For sure. Have you tried to use AI to build the models themselves yet? I'm curious if it can build mechanical systems well.