> it gets very hard to keep a good mental model of the constituent parts of your 3D model in your head I had that exact problem initially. Then I realized tha

> it gets very hard to keep a good mental model of the constituent parts of your 3D model in your head I had that exact problem initially. Then I realized that the problem was exactly identical to designing large-scale code: however big your brain, you won't be able to keep all the details in your head after some point and therefore you need to design things hierarchically or in some sort of modular fashion, just like when you write code. And this is where OpenSCAD really shines: if you apply the same kind of engineering discipline to your 3D models that you would to a large-scale and complex piece of code, you can make things that are way more complex than you would with a WYSIWYG type environment and have them fully parametric to boot. The one thing that I find lacking is self-introspection capabilities, i.e if I am in a caller piece of OpenSCAD code, calling to an OpenSCAD module that returns a piece of geometry, I would love to be able to "probe" the returned geometry from the caller in order to use it in the bigger piece I'm building. As a simple example of what I mean: it'd be great to have the AABB of the model returned by a module, or be able throw an arbitrary ray at it and get the first intersection so as to properly design the piece next to it.