5 ms·

Show HN: AI in SolidWorks

191 points by WillNickols 9mo ago

Hey HN! We’re Will and Jorge, and we’ve built LAD (Language-Aided Design), a SolidWorks add-in that uses LLMs to create sketches, features, assemblies, and macros from conversational inputs (https://www.trylad.com/ https://www.trylad.com/). We come from software engineering backgrounds where tools like Claude Code and Cursor have come to dominate, but when poking around CAD systems a few months back we realized there's no way to go from a text prompt input to a modeling output in any of the major CAD systems. In our testing, the LLMs aren't as good at making 3D objects as they are are writing code, but we think they'll get a lot better in the upcoming months and years. To bridge this gap, we've created LAD, an add-in in SolidWorks to turn conversational input and uploaded documents/images into parts, assemblies, and macros. It includes: - Dozens of tools the LLM can call to create sketches, features, and other objects in parts. - Assembly tools the LLM can call to turn parts into assemblies. - File system tools the LLM can use to create, save, search, and read SolidWorks files and documentation. - Macro writing/running tools plus a SolidWorks API documentation search so the LLM can use macros. - Automatic screenshots and feature tree parsing to provide the LLM context on the current state. - Checkpointing to roll back unwanted edits and permissioning to determine which commands wait for user permission. You can try LAD at https://www.trylad.com/ https://www.trylad.com/ and let us know what features would make it more useful for your work. To be honest, the LLMs aren't great at CAD right now, but we're mostly curious to hear if people would want and use this if it worked well.

doctorpangloss 9mo ago
it's definitely interesting, but the demo of the coffee mug has a lot of flaws, are there some concrete examples you can think of where the hosted LLMs really shine in this problem?
- WillNickols 9mo ago
  Honestly, the out-of-the-box models aren't great at CAD. We were mostly trying to figure out (1) how well it could do with the best harness we could give it and (2) whether people would want and use this if it worked well.
- jasongill 9mo ago
  What are the flaws? I've watched the video a couple times and the only thing I can see that it does wrong is the fillets on the handle (and maybe the way it used a spline & sweep for the handle could have been improved but it's no worse than you'd see from a new Solidworks user).
  - its_ethan 9mo ago
    Not sure if it's a "flaw" or not, but I always get stuck on AI + 3D design stuff with there being no dimensional information or control. How big is that mug? Slowing it down and trying to catch some dim info the initial cylinder has a radius of ~39. Regardless of if that's default inches, that's one hell of a mug. Sure you can scale it, but it's not great practice to design something and then just apply a scaling to get it to the intended size.
    - WillNickols 9mo ago
      All the dimensions are in mm by default, so 39 mm radius on a mug is about right. For all their flaws, the LLMs do usually provide reasonable dimensions.
      - its_ethan 9mo ago
        That's fair, it just bothers me when examples are like "a block with two holes in it" and sure the result is a block with two holes, but when are you going to want that without having those two holes in very specific spots at a specific size? lol
akiselev 9mo ago
I've been working on this exact same thing with both Solidworks and Altium! There has definitely been a step change in Opus 4.5; I first had it first reverse engineer the Altium file format using a Ghidra MCP and was impressed and how well it worked with decompiled Delphi. Gemini 3 Pro/Flash also make a huge difference with data extraction from PDFs like foot prints or mechanical drawings so we're close to closing the whole loop on several different fields, not just with software engineering. For the most part they still suck at anything resembling real spatial reasoning but they're capable of doing incredibly monotonous things that most people wouldn't put themselves through like meticulously labeling every pin or putting strict design rule checks on each net or setting up DSN files for autorouter. It even makes the hard routing quite easy because it can set up the DRC using the Saturn calculator so I don't have to deal with that. If you give them a natural language interface [1] (a CLI in a claude skill, thats it) that you can translate to concrete actions, coordinates, etc. it shines. Opus can prioritize nets for manual vs autorouting, place the major components using language like "middle of board" which I then use another LLM to translate to concrete steps, and just in general do a lot of the annoying things I used to have to do. You can even combine the visual understanding of Gemini with the actions generated by Opus to take it a step further, by having the latter generate instructions and the former generates JSON DSL to that gets executed. I'm really curious what the defensibility of all these businesses is going to be going forward. I have no plans on entering that business but my limit at this point is I'm not willing to pay more than $200/mo for several Max plans to have dozens of agents running all the time. When it only takes an hour to create a harness that allows Claude to go hog wild with desktop apps there is a LOT of unexplored space but just about anyone who can torrent Solidworks or Altium can figure it out. On the other hand, if it's just a bunch of people bootstrapping, they won't have the same pressure to grow. Good luck! [1] Stuff like "place U1 to the left of U4, 50mm away" and the CLI translates that to structured data with absolute coordinates on the PCB. Having the LLM spit out natural language and then using another LLM with structured outputs to translate that to a JSON DSL works very well, including when you need Opus to do stuff like click on screen.
- WillNickols 9mo ago
  Thanks for the input! Haven't done much with Altium but it seems like you get at least somewhat of a boost for it being slightly more about the logic and less about the spatial reasoning. 2 things related to what you said I hadn't put in the original post: 1. In our experience, the LLMs were awful at taking actions directly with any of the SolidWorks API scripting formats (C#, VBA, etc.). Probably 75% of what they wrote just failed to run, and even when they had access to browse the documentation it wasn't much better. If you're getting Opus or anything else to interact with SolidWorks from the CLI, can you say more about how you're getting it to interface effectively? 2. The LLMs are indeed surprisingly bad at spatial reasoning unless prompted specifically and individually. The most notable case of this is when they need to choose the right plane to sketch on. When creating revolve features, they'll often choose the face that would've only worked if they were going to extrude rather than revolve, and when creating sweeps they'll often try to put the sketch that's going to be swept on the same plane as the path that's being swept. If you go back and ask them why they did that and point out that it's wrong, they can fix it pretty fast, but when left to their own devices they often get quite stuck on this.
Legend2440 9mo ago
I think there's a lot of potential for AI in 3D modeling. But I'm not convinced text is the best user interface for it, and current LLMs seem to have a poor understanding of 3D space.
- WillNickols 9mo ago
  Curious what you think is the best interface for it? We thought about this ourselves and talked to some folks but it didn't seem there was a clear alternative to chat.
  - nancyminusone 9mo ago
    Solidworks's current controls are the best interface for it. "Draw a picture" is something you're going to find really difficult to beat. Most of the other parametric CADs work the same way, and Solidworks is widely known as one of the best interfaces on top of that. They've spent decades building one that is both unambiguous and fast.
    - thesuitonym 9mo ago
      Maybe it's just the engineers I've worked with, but I've never heard anyone describe Solidworks as "fast." (Of course, you and I know it is, it's just that you're asking it to do a lot)
      - nancyminusone 9mo ago
        Haha yes, I've never heard any engineer discribe any CAD package as anything other than slow and full of bugs. But of the alternatives, I think most would still pick Solidworks.
        FuriouslyAdrift 9mo ago
        All of our production engineers that use CATIA think SolidWorks is fast... I guess it's all in the perspective
proee 9mo ago
How about support for Fusion 360?
- WillNickols 9mo ago
  Would you use something like this if it worked well in Fusion 360? We chose to start with SolidWorks because when talking with people in mechanical engineering, almost everyone was using SolidWorks and no one even mentioned Fusion (despite online surveys saying it's like 45/45).
  - greenavocado 9mo ago
    Seemingly half the FDM modellers on Printables.com use Fusion 360 Solidworks is the GOAT though
  - s0rce 9mo ago
    My experience has been professional engineers are using Solid works. Hobbiests are using a variety of often free software.
    - abe_m 9mo ago
      Fusion doesn't have the needed tools to large machine designs with multiple components. They have only just added the ability to have assemblies where the parts are separately defined in their own files. Without that, it is only suitable for small, low parts count, one off projects.
  - nancyminusone 9mo ago
    The people who use Solidworks buy Solidworks to use Solidworks. You'll go up to one of them and they'll have the whole model done in like 8 key presses before you even finish typing in your prompt. All the people who aren't professional CAD users have Fusion, which they can get for free. They would probably benefit the most from text to model AI, but would probably also be the least willing to pay.
waynenilsen 9mo ago
> the LLMs aren't as good at making 3D objects as they are are writing code I am still hoping that openSCAD or something similar can grab hold of the community. openSCAD needs some kind of npm as well as imports for mcmaster-carr etc but I think it could work.
carlcortright 9mo ago
The craziest thing I learned clicking on this post is that solidworks has barely changed in the 15 years since I last used it
- jasongill 9mo ago
  don't worry, the one thing they did change was adding "the cloud" called 3DEXPERIENCE which is universally hated and gets more and more intrusively jammed into each new release. oh and they changed the price as well, it went up, and up, and up
  - abe_m 9mo ago
    We had a sales person try to explain how file handling in 3DExperience is done. They were presenting how magic everything is where the right version of the file is always present in Catia for modelling, Abaqus for FEA, and whereever else in the package. OK, how do we work with our CMM and CAM software? How do we send files to clients and vendors? crickets Not confidence inspiring.
- nancyminusone 9mo ago
  Shouldn't surprise you that much. Spreadsheets and word processing haven't changed in decades either. Solidworks might be as close to a final form for CAD as you're going to get.
- iancmceachern 9mo ago
  It's the same for all mission n critical software. Catia, Unix, Matlab, Maya, on and on. This is how you build a industrial base of people with decades of experience to design all these things. If the UI changed every year how would people get truly good at their work?
OgsyedIE 9mo ago
CAD and machining are different fields, true, but I see a lot of the same flaws that Adam Karvonen highlighted in his essay on LLM-aided machining a few months ago: https://adamkarvonen.github.io/machine_learning/2025/04/13/llm-manufacturing-eval.html https://adamkarvonen.github.io/machine_learning/2025/04/13/l... Do any people with familiarity on what's under the hood know if the latent space produced by most transformer paradigms is only capable of natively simulating 1-d reasoning and has to kludge together any process for figuring geometry with more degrees of freedom?
- CamperBob2 9mo ago
  Well, they couldn't generate 2D artwork if they weren't capable of working with multiple output dimensions. An interesting thing about transformers is that they are world-class at compressing 2D image data even when not trained on anything but textual language ( https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.10668 https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.10668 ). Whether that notion is relevant for 3D content would be two or three figures over my pay grade, though.
- Otterly99 9mo ago
  Commenting on the link you provided: is using a LLM the right approach for this? Why not train a specified model to generate accurate CAD drawings, rather than offloading the task to some LLM that, while it might have some knowledge of machining or CAD conception, will probably fail, because that is not really what it was built for.
jwr 9mo ago
FWIW, I've been testing MCP tools exposed from Autodesk Fusion (https://github.com/AuraFriday/Fusion-360-MCP-Server https://github.com/AuraFriday/Fusion-360-MCP-Server) and the results are quite promising. It's especially good as a quick starting point.
layer8 9mo ago
Should have called it ChAD (Chat-Aided Design).
- sl_convertible 9mo ago
  We're getting closer and closer to Jarvis.
wojciem 9mo ago
Totally relatable pain- getting LLMs to reliably drive precise CAD operations is surprisingly hard, especially when spatial reasoning and plane/extrude/chamfer decisions go wrong 70%+ of the time. For people looking at a different angle on the "text to 3D model" problem, I've been playing with https://www.timbr.pro https://www.timbr.pro lately. Not trying to replace SolidWorks precision, but great for the early fuzzy "make me something that looks roughly like X" phase before you bring it into real CAD.
fallat 9mo ago
Why would I just not use some local desktop Agent?... Like what
mikeayles 9mo ago
I think we are targeting different ends of the market, but I'm trying to do a full product development pipeline end to end. PCB, enclosure, peripherals, firmware. https://github.com/MichaelAyles/heph/blob/main/blogs/0029blog.md https://github.com/MichaelAyles/heph/blob/main/blogs/0029blo... I need to redo this blog, because I did it on a run where the enclosure defaulted to the exploded view, and kicanvas bugged out, either way, the bones of it is working. Next up is to add more subcircuits, do cloud compilation of firmware, kicad_pcb to gerbers. Then order the first prototype!
- Liftyee 9mo ago
  Very interesting project! My understanding is that the circuits are human-validated hard coded modular blocks - is this correct? I didn't fully catch how PCB routing and placement is done. I haven't yet seen a credible from-scratch AI schematic design tool (though, admittedly, most of my projects are a mix of repeatable modules and custom circuitry... It would help to have a "known working" setup.)
  - mikeayles 9mo ago
    Yep, exactly. I'll do another blog when I have a little more to show, but the concept is, everything is on a grid of 12.7mm squares, where there is a common bus running through north-south. The boards need to be 4 layer and feature size is pretty small, 0402 passives for example, maybe even 0201 if I'm really optimising for size. SCH: https://github.com/MichaelAyles/heph/blob/main/blogs/0029-images/2026-01-13%2010_59_19-1x1_template%20%E2%80%94%20PCB%20Editor.png https://github.com/MichaelAyles/heph/blob/main/blogs/0029-im... 3D bottomside: https://github.com/MichaelAyles/heph/blob/main/blogs/0029-images/2026-01-13%2010_59_05-3D%20Viewer.png https://github.com/MichaelAyles/heph/blob/main/blogs/0029-im... In the Phaestus workflow, it chooses modules, for example the main cpu block just has an ESP32C6-XIAO board on it, since it has massive compute, and radio with wifi6 and zigbee, which covers 90% of IOT. Since this is larger than 0.5" it sits in the middle of a 2x2, which bridges both sets of north-south buses, with all common pins. Bidged pinouts: https://github.com/MichaelAyles/heph/blob/main/blogs/0029-images/2026-01-13%2010_53_30-1x1_template%20%E2%80%94%20PCB%20Editor.png https://github.com/MichaelAyles/heph/blob/main/blogs/0029-im... Early XIAO: https://github.com/MichaelAyles/heph/blob/main/blogs/0029-images/2026-01-13%2010_47_32-3D%20Viewer.png https://github.com/MichaelAyles/heph/blob/main/blogs/0029-im... It's been a pain in the butt to design for, since the vias need enough clearance, and we are almost maxed out on our bottom side, so on the 2x2's i've given it as much room as I can in the middle to allow for topside routing with a few vias. Then, when assembling the board, it does a 0.1mm overlap n/s, which merges the nets, whilst the system keeps track of what signals are used, so I2C is all multiparticipant, spi1 gets the default CS line, otherwise it can use the aux pins via a resistor selector, the AUX5/AUX6 aren't connected to the XIAO, so if you wanted to do something like a USB power monitor, the power can run isolated at higher voltages, as long as they get fed through a current/voltage sensing block, which could be 1x1, 1x2 or 2x2. As for component placing in the enclosure, buttons are sub-boards with a wire-to-board connector, and the 1x1 module is a block that contains a connector and an PCA9570, which allows the button to be placed anywhere with defined mounting features. Similar for LCD's, the pre-designed block has a FFC connector, and comes with constraints, e.g. place at end of design, so the screen can fold back on itself, whereas if it was mounted in the middle, it wouldn't be able to go where it needs to be.
amelius 9mo ago
I'd say let's first build an AI that can reliably read datasheets and technical drawings. I've tried ChatGpt and Claude on datasheets of electronic components, and I'm sorry to say that they are awful at it. Before that is fixed, I don't have high hopes for an AI that can generate CAD/EDA models that correctly follow some specification.
Tossrock 9mo ago
> but when poking around CAD systems a few months back we realized there's no way to go from a text prompt input to a modeling output in any of the major CAD systems. This is exactly what SGS-1 is, and it's better than this approach because it's actually a model trained to generate Breps, not just asking an LLM to write code to do it.
arjie 9mo ago
This is incredible. Coincidentally, I've just started using Claude Code to model things using OpenSCAD and it's pretty decent. The fact that it can generate preview PNGs, inspect them, and then cycle back to continue iterating is pretty valuable. But the things I make are pretty simple. My wife was designing a spring-loaded model that fits in our baby walls so that we can make it more modularly attached to our walls and she used Blender. Part of it is that it's harder to make a slightly more complex model with an LLM. Solidworks is out of our budget for the kind of things we're building but I'm hoping if this stuff is successful, people work on things down the market. Good luck!
areoform 9mo ago
I have a SolidWorks Students License™©® and it's the most frustrating piece of software I have ever used. Links to tutorials don't work. And when you do manage to get one, the tutorials are designed for older versions of solidworks and point to buttons that have been moved / don't exist where the tutorial tells you to look in the 2025 version. The UI is the inverse of whatever intuitive is. It's built on convention after convention after convention. If you understand the shibboleths (and I'm guessing most people take a certified course by a trainer for it?), then it's great, but if you don't, it really sucks to be you (i.e. me). I would LOVE to try out what you've built, but I am afraid that if the model misinterprets me or makes a mistake, it'll take me longer to debug / correct it than it would to just build it from scratch. The kinds of things I want to make in solidworks are apparently hard to make in solidworks (arbitrarily / continuously + asymmetrically curved surfaces). I'm assuming that there won't be too many projects like this in the training dataset? How does the LLM handle something that's so out of pocket?
- Liftyee 9mo ago
  If it helps, I switched from SOLIDWORKS to Onshape many years ago and the latter has only improved since. The multi-user editing is first class and personally I find the user interface more intuitive (plus, web based = Linux support). I don't need the advanced simulation, analysis, etc. features that SW has over Onshape... yet. Personally not familiar with curved models, but my understanding is that surface modelling with lofts guided by spline contours might be the way to go. Not sure if SW has those features.
  - LoganDark 9mo ago
    I like Plasticity (I paid for a studio license), but it doesn't have any sort of lossless editing or timeline features, etc.
- WillNickols 9mo ago
  Every time you put in a query, LAD takes a snapshot of the current model and stores it, so you can revert whatever changes the LLM makes if it messes up.
- 9mo ago
jehna1 9mo ago
I've been experimenting with Claude Code and different code-to-cad tools and the best workflow yet has been with Replicad. It allows for realtime rendering in a browser window as Claude does changes to a single code file. Here's an example I finished just a few minutes ago: https://github.com/jehna/plant-light-holder/blob/main/src/plant-light-holder.ts https://github.com/jehna/plant-light-holder/blob/main/src/pl...
nico 9mo ago
Would love something like this for Fusion 360. Being able to just prompt the UI to create or edit objects. It would be cool if (like with coding agents in which you can add context using @filepath), you could use the mouse to click/select context objects for the prompt to execute with
sora2video 9mo ago
[dead]
nsoonhui 9mo ago
This is interesting, how do you get it done? From what I know CAD tools generally don't support text file, only binary blob which is LLM unfriendly? Do you consider adding support for AutoCAD or AutoCAD vertically integrated software like Civil 3D?
- WillNickols 9mo ago
  The conversation itself is sent to the LLM in regular text, and in addition it sees the feature tree (also text) and often a screenshot of whatever the current model looks like. This is usually enough for the model to know what's going on. Yes - we're likely looking into other 3D systems in the future.
iancmceachern 9mo ago
Cool, I'll check it out!!
JoeDohn 9mo ago
as mentioned below you need to go vertically on all CADs and reduce your risk. 3DS is a company that lives in 90s, they will simply turn off your access one day without any consideration. (also they have some shit AI chat thing in the "3d experience platform", so for them you are already a threat).
crobertsbmw 9mo ago
I’m just a grumpy old man, but I like having to do it the hard way. I liked having to code the hard way too. With all the AI vibe coding stuff I now feel like I’m stupid for doing it the hard way. And I probably am. I would definitely think someone else was stupid if they were using an axe to cut down a tree when there’s a chainsaw sitting right next to them. Or if someone was writing assembly code when anything else would do just fine… I guess I feel sad that the AI gets to take over a lot of the mundane but also often times relaxing and fun parts.
- ipnon 9mo ago
  I feel like I am still doing it the hard way, I just have to type 10x less into my keyboard to get the same amount of code out. But as soon as my understanding of the system diverges from its reality, I still do the old fashioned work of figuring out the difference and how to resolve it. It feels like a printing press replacing scribes to me.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
pedropaulovc 9mo ago
This is amazing! I have no CAD experience and so I tried creating my own bespoke version of LAD a while ago by crawling the SolidWorks docs into a very LLM-optimized format [1] and then asking Claude Code to write C# code using the SolidWorks SDK. Even with docs, it still struggled: functions that fail quietly, extremely verbose code and with no easy way to run tests to ensure that the results are accurate. As an example, here's the 400 lines of code it produced for an eccentric cam [2]. Attempts to close the loop by feeding CC png renders in multiple views had absolutely horrible results. Claude could not differentiate up from down, features etc. I'll try LAD tomorrow, fingers crossed it work better. [1] https://github.com/pedropaulovc/offline-solidworks-api-docs https://github.com/pedropaulovc/offline-solidworks-api-docs [2] https://github.com/pedropaulovc/harmonic-analyzer/blob/main/cad/Parts/EccentricCam.cs https://github.com/pedropaulovc/harmonic-analyzer/blob/main/...
ricksunny 9mo ago
Skip mechanical LLM; iterate on mechatronic LLM instead https://github.com/ricksher/ASimpleMechatronicMarkupLanguage https://github.com/ricksher/ASimpleMechatronicMarkupLanguage
Jemm 9mo ago
Windows Defender is flagging this as containing Sabsik.EN.A!ml
ponyous 9mo ago
Very cool and quite advanced compared to my tool. I've been working on something similar, although not an addon for SolidWorks, but a web SaaS. Initially started it as a tool to help my grandpa make some simple models (ChatGPT clicked for him SolidWorks was impossible). Still have a long way to go, but if anyone wants to try you can do it here: https://grandpacad.com https://grandpacad.com If you want more free credits send me an email and I'm happy to give you some.
skeptrune 9mo ago
Wow, this is really cool. Now I want to go and get a windows machine and solidworks license again just to play with this.
PonyoSunshine 9mo ago
Congratulations. I have been pondering myself if I could do something similar with Rhino. Is there any chance this can be adopted to other platforms like Rhino?

191 points by WillNickols 9mo ago

doctorpangloss 9mo ago

it's definitely interesting, but the demo of the coffee mug has a lot of flaws, are there some concrete examples you can think of where the hosted LLMs really shine in this problem?

WillNickols 9mo ago
Honestly, the out-of-the-box models aren't great at CAD. We were mostly trying to figure out (1) how well it could do with the best harness we could give it and (2) whether people would want and use this if it worked well.
jasongill 9mo ago
What are the flaws? I've watched the video a couple times and the only thing I can see that it does wrong is the fillets on the handle (and maybe the way it used a spline & sweep for the handle could have been improved but it's no worse than you'd see from a new Solidworks user).
- its_ethan 9mo ago
  Not sure if it's a "flaw" or not, but I always get stuck on AI + 3D design stuff with there being no dimensional information or control. How big is that mug? Slowing it down and trying to catch some dim info the initial cylinder has a radius of ~39. Regardless of if that's default inches, that's one hell of a mug. Sure you can scale it, but it's not great practice to design something and then just apply a scaling to get it to the intended size.
  - WillNickols 9mo ago
    All the dimensions are in mm by default, so 39 mm radius on a mug is about right. For all their flaws, the LLMs do usually provide reasonable dimensions.
    - its_ethan 9mo ago
      That's fair, it just bothers me when examples are like "a block with two holes in it" and sure the result is a block with two holes, but when are you going to want that without having those two holes in very specific spots at a specific size? lol

akiselev 9mo ago

I've been working on this exact same thing with both Solidworks and Altium! There has definitely been a step change in Opus 4.5; I first had it first reverse engineer the Altium file format using a Ghidra MCP and was impressed and how well it worked with decompiled Delphi. Gemini 3 Pro/Flash also make a huge difference with data extraction from PDFs like foot prints or mechanical drawings so we're close to closing the whole loop on several different fields, not just with software engineering. For the most part they still suck at anything resembling real spatial reasoning but they're capable of doing incredibly monotonous things that most people wouldn't put themselves through like meticulously labeling every pin or putting strict design rule checks on each net or setting up DSN files for autorouter. It even makes the hard routing quite easy because it can set up the DRC using the Saturn calculator so I don't have to deal with that. If you give them a natural language interface [1] (a CLI in a claude skill, thats it) that you can translate to concrete actions, coordinates, etc. it shines. Opus can prioritize nets for manual vs autorouting, place the major components using language like "middle of board" which I then use another LLM to translate to concrete steps, and just in general do a lot of the annoying things I used to have to do. You can even combine the visual understanding of Gemini with the actions generated by Opus to take it a step further, by having the latter generate instructions and the former generates JSON DSL to that gets executed. I'm really curious what the defensibility of all these businesses is going to be going forward. I have no plans on entering that business but my limit at this point is I'm not willing to pay more than $200/mo for several Max plans to have dozens of agents running all the time. When it only takes an hour to create a harness that allows Claude to go hog wild with desktop apps there is a LOT of unexplored space but just about anyone who can torrent Solidworks or Altium can figure it out. On the other hand, if it's just a bunch of people bootstrapping, they won't have the same pressure to grow. Good luck! [1] Stuff like "place U1 to the left of U4, 50mm away" and the CLI translates that to structured data with absolute coordinates on the PCB. Having the LLM spit out natural language and then using another LLM with structured outputs to translate that to a JSON DSL works very well, including when you need Opus to do stuff like click on screen.

WillNickols 9mo ago
Thanks for the input! Haven't done much with Altium but it seems like you get at least somewhat of a boost for it being slightly more about the logic and less about the spatial reasoning. 2 things related to what you said I hadn't put in the original post: 1. In our experience, the LLMs were awful at taking actions directly with any of the SolidWorks API scripting formats (C#, VBA, etc.). Probably 75% of what they wrote just failed to run, and even when they had access to browse the documentation it wasn't much better. If you're getting Opus or anything else to interact with SolidWorks from the CLI, can you say more about how you're getting it to interface effectively? 2. The LLMs are indeed surprisingly bad at spatial reasoning unless prompted specifically and individually. The most notable case of this is when they need to choose the right plane to sketch on. When creating revolve features, they'll often choose the face that would've only worked if they were going to extrude rather than revolve, and when creating sweeps they'll often try to put the sketch that's going to be swept on the same plane as the path that's being swept. If you go back and ask them why they did that and point out that it's wrong, they can fix it pretty fast, but when left to their own devices they often get quite stuck on this.

Legend2440 9mo ago

I think there's a lot of potential for AI in 3D modeling. But I'm not convinced text is the best user interface for it, and current LLMs seem to have a poor understanding of 3D space.

WillNickols 9mo ago
Curious what you think is the best interface for it? We thought about this ourselves and talked to some folks but it didn't seem there was a clear alternative to chat.
- nancyminusone 9mo ago
  Solidworks's current controls are the best interface for it. "Draw a picture" is something you're going to find really difficult to beat. Most of the other parametric CADs work the same way, and Solidworks is widely known as one of the best interfaces on top of that. They've spent decades building one that is both unambiguous and fast.
  - thesuitonym 9mo ago
    Maybe it's just the engineers I've worked with, but I've never heard anyone describe Solidworks as "fast." (Of course, you and I know it is, it's just that you're asking it to do a lot)
    - nancyminusone 9mo ago
      Haha yes, I've never heard any engineer discribe any CAD package as anything other than slow and full of bugs. But of the alternatives, I think most would still pick Solidworks.
      - FuriouslyAdrift 9mo ago
        All of our production engineers that use CATIA think SolidWorks is fast... I guess it's all in the perspective

proee 9mo ago

How about support for Fusion 360?

WillNickols 9mo ago
Would you use something like this if it worked well in Fusion 360? We chose to start with SolidWorks because when talking with people in mechanical engineering, almost everyone was using SolidWorks and no one even mentioned Fusion (despite online surveys saying it's like 45/45).
- greenavocado 9mo ago
  Seemingly half the FDM modellers on Printables.com use Fusion 360 Solidworks is the GOAT though
- s0rce 9mo ago
  My experience has been professional engineers are using Solid works. Hobbiests are using a variety of often free software.
  - abe_m 9mo ago
    Fusion doesn't have the needed tools to large machine designs with multiple components. They have only just added the ability to have assemblies where the parts are separately defined in their own files. Without that, it is only suitable for small, low parts count, one off projects.
- nancyminusone 9mo ago
  The people who use Solidworks buy Solidworks to use Solidworks. You'll go up to one of them and they'll have the whole model done in like 8 key presses before you even finish typing in your prompt. All the people who aren't professional CAD users have Fusion, which they can get for free. They would probably benefit the most from text to model AI, but would probably also be the least willing to pay.

waynenilsen 9mo ago

> the LLMs aren't as good at making 3D objects as they are are writing code I am still hoping that openSCAD or something similar can grab hold of the community. openSCAD needs some kind of npm as well as imports for mcmaster-carr etc but I think it could work.

carlcortright 9mo ago

The craziest thing I learned clicking on this post is that solidworks has barely changed in the 15 years since I last used it

jasongill 9mo ago
don't worry, the one thing they did change was adding "the cloud" called 3DEXPERIENCE which is universally hated and gets more and more intrusively jammed into each new release. oh and they changed the price as well, it went up, and up, and up
- abe_m 9mo ago
  We had a sales person try to explain how file handling in 3DExperience is done. They were presenting how magic everything is where the right version of the file is always present in Catia for modelling, Abaqus for FEA, and whereever else in the package. OK, how do we work with our CMM and CAM software? How do we send files to clients and vendors? crickets Not confidence inspiring.
nancyminusone 9mo ago
Shouldn't surprise you that much. Spreadsheets and word processing haven't changed in decades either. Solidworks might be as close to a final form for CAD as you're going to get.
iancmceachern 9mo ago
It's the same for all mission n critical software. Catia, Unix, Matlab, Maya, on and on. This is how you build a industrial base of people with decades of experience to design all these things. If the UI changed every year how would people get truly good at their work?

OgsyedIE 9mo ago

CAD and machining are different fields, true, but I see a lot of the same flaws that Adam Karvonen highlighted in his essay on LLM-aided machining a few months ago: https://adamkarvonen.github.io/machine_learning/2025/04/13/llm-manufacturing-eval.html https://adamkarvonen.github.io/machine_learning/2025/04/13/l... Do any people with familiarity on what's under the hood know if the latent space produced by most transformer paradigms is only capable of natively simulating 1-d reasoning and has to kludge together any process for figuring geometry with more degrees of freedom?

CamperBob2 9mo ago
Well, they couldn't generate 2D artwork if they weren't capable of working with multiple output dimensions. An interesting thing about transformers is that they are world-class at compressing 2D image data even when not trained on anything but textual language ( https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.10668 https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.10668 ). Whether that notion is relevant for 3D content would be two or three figures over my pay grade, though.
Otterly99 9mo ago
Commenting on the link you provided: is using a LLM the right approach for this? Why not train a specified model to generate accurate CAD drawings, rather than offloading the task to some LLM that, while it might have some knowledge of machining or CAD conception, will probably fail, because that is not really what it was built for.

jwr 9mo ago

FWIW, I've been testing MCP tools exposed from Autodesk Fusion (https://github.com/AuraFriday/Fusion-360-MCP-Server https://github.com/AuraFriday/Fusion-360-MCP-Server) and the results are quite promising. It's especially good as a quick starting point.

layer8 9mo ago

Should have called it ChAD (Chat-Aided Design).

sl_convertible 9mo ago
We're getting closer and closer to Jarvis.

wojciem 9mo ago

Totally relatable pain- getting LLMs to reliably drive precise CAD operations is surprisingly hard, especially when spatial reasoning and plane/extrude/chamfer decisions go wrong 70%+ of the time. For people looking at a different angle on the "text to 3D model" problem, I've been playing with https://www.timbr.pro https://www.timbr.pro lately. Not trying to replace SolidWorks precision, but great for the early fuzzy "make me something that looks roughly like X" phase before you bring it into real CAD.

fallat 9mo ago

Why would I just not use some local desktop Agent?... Like what

mikeayles 9mo ago

I think we are targeting different ends of the market, but I'm trying to do a full product development pipeline end to end. PCB, enclosure, peripherals, firmware. https://github.com/MichaelAyles/heph/blob/main/blogs/0029blog.md https://github.com/MichaelAyles/heph/blob/main/blogs/0029blo... I need to redo this blog, because I did it on a run where the enclosure defaulted to the exploded view, and kicanvas bugged out, either way, the bones of it is working. Next up is to add more subcircuits, do cloud compilation of firmware, kicad_pcb to gerbers. Then order the first prototype!

Liftyee 9mo ago
Very interesting project! My understanding is that the circuits are human-validated hard coded modular blocks - is this correct? I didn't fully catch how PCB routing and placement is done. I haven't yet seen a credible from-scratch AI schematic design tool (though, admittedly, most of my projects are a mix of repeatable modules and custom circuitry... It would help to have a "known working" setup.)
- mikeayles 9mo ago
  Yep, exactly. I'll do another blog when I have a little more to show, but the concept is, everything is on a grid of 12.7mm squares, where there is a common bus running through north-south. The boards need to be 4 layer and feature size is pretty small, 0402 passives for example, maybe even 0201 if I'm really optimising for size. SCH: https://github.com/MichaelAyles/heph/blob/main/blogs/0029-images/2026-01-13%2010_59_19-1x1_template%20%E2%80%94%20PCB%20Editor.png https://github.com/MichaelAyles/heph/blob/main/blogs/0029-im... 3D bottomside: https://github.com/MichaelAyles/heph/blob/main/blogs/0029-images/2026-01-13%2010_59_05-3D%20Viewer.png https://github.com/MichaelAyles/heph/blob/main/blogs/0029-im... In the Phaestus workflow, it chooses modules, for example the main cpu block just has an ESP32C6-XIAO board on it, since it has massive compute, and radio with wifi6 and zigbee, which covers 90% of IOT. Since this is larger than 0.5" it sits in the middle of a 2x2, which bridges both sets of north-south buses, with all common pins. Bidged pinouts: https://github.com/MichaelAyles/heph/blob/main/blogs/0029-images/2026-01-13%2010_53_30-1x1_template%20%E2%80%94%20PCB%20Editor.png https://github.com/MichaelAyles/heph/blob/main/blogs/0029-im... Early XIAO: https://github.com/MichaelAyles/heph/blob/main/blogs/0029-images/2026-01-13%2010_47_32-3D%20Viewer.png https://github.com/MichaelAyles/heph/blob/main/blogs/0029-im... It's been a pain in the butt to design for, since the vias need enough clearance, and we are almost maxed out on our bottom side, so on the 2x2's i've given it as much room as I can in the middle to allow for topside routing with a few vias. Then, when assembling the board, it does a 0.1mm overlap n/s, which merges the nets, whilst the system keeps track of what signals are used, so I2C is all multiparticipant, spi1 gets the default CS line, otherwise it can use the aux pins via a resistor selector, the AUX5/AUX6 aren't connected to the XIAO, so if you wanted to do something like a USB power monitor, the power can run isolated at higher voltages, as long as they get fed through a current/voltage sensing block, which could be 1x1, 1x2 or 2x2. As for component placing in the enclosure, buttons are sub-boards with a wire-to-board connector, and the 1x1 module is a block that contains a connector and an PCA9570, which allows the button to be placed anywhere with defined mounting features. Similar for LCD's, the pre-designed block has a FFC connector, and comes with constraints, e.g. place at end of design, so the screen can fold back on itself, whereas if it was mounted in the middle, it wouldn't be able to go where it needs to be.

amelius 9mo ago

I'd say let's first build an AI that can reliably read datasheets and technical drawings. I've tried ChatGpt and Claude on datasheets of electronic components, and I'm sorry to say that they are awful at it. Before that is fixed, I don't have high hopes for an AI that can generate CAD/EDA models that correctly follow some specification.

Tossrock 9mo ago

> but when poking around CAD systems a few months back we realized there's no way to go from a text prompt input to a modeling output in any of the major CAD systems. This is exactly what SGS-1 is, and it's better than this approach because it's actually a model trained to generate Breps, not just asking an LLM to write code to do it.

arjie 9mo ago

This is incredible. Coincidentally, I've just started using Claude Code to model things using OpenSCAD and it's pretty decent. The fact that it can generate preview PNGs, inspect them, and then cycle back to continue iterating is pretty valuable. But the things I make are pretty simple. My wife was designing a spring-loaded model that fits in our baby walls so that we can make it more modularly attached to our walls and she used Blender. Part of it is that it's harder to make a slightly more complex model with an LLM. Solidworks is out of our budget for the kind of things we're building but I'm hoping if this stuff is successful, people work on things down the market. Good luck!

areoform 9mo ago

I have a SolidWorks Students License™©® and it's the most frustrating piece of software I have ever used. Links to tutorials don't work. And when you do manage to get one, the tutorials are designed for older versions of solidworks and point to buttons that have been moved / don't exist where the tutorial tells you to look in the 2025 version. The UI is the inverse of whatever intuitive is. It's built on convention after convention after convention. If you understand the shibboleths (and I'm guessing most people take a certified course by a trainer for it?), then it's great, but if you don't, it really sucks to be you (i.e. me). I would LOVE to try out what you've built, but I am afraid that if the model misinterprets me or makes a mistake, it'll take me longer to debug / correct it than it would to just build it from scratch. The kinds of things I want to make in solidworks are apparently hard to make in solidworks (arbitrarily / continuously + asymmetrically curved surfaces). I'm assuming that there won't be too many projects like this in the training dataset? How does the LLM handle something that's so out of pocket?

Liftyee 9mo ago
If it helps, I switched from SOLIDWORKS to Onshape many years ago and the latter has only improved since. The multi-user editing is first class and personally I find the user interface more intuitive (plus, web based = Linux support). I don't need the advanced simulation, analysis, etc. features that SW has over Onshape... yet. Personally not familiar with curved models, but my understanding is that surface modelling with lofts guided by spline contours might be the way to go. Not sure if SW has those features.
- LoganDark 9mo ago
  I like Plasticity (I paid for a studio license), but it doesn't have any sort of lossless editing or timeline features, etc.
WillNickols 9mo ago
Every time you put in a query, LAD takes a snapshot of the current model and stores it, so you can revert whatever changes the LLM makes if it messes up.
9mo ago

jehna1 9mo ago

I've been experimenting with Claude Code and different code-to-cad tools and the best workflow yet has been with Replicad. It allows for realtime rendering in a browser window as Claude does changes to a single code file. Here's an example I finished just a few minutes ago: https://github.com/jehna/plant-light-holder/blob/main/src/plant-light-holder.ts https://github.com/jehna/plant-light-holder/blob/main/src/pl...

nico 9mo ago

Would love something like this for Fusion 360. Being able to just prompt the UI to create or edit objects. It would be cool if (like with coding agents in which you can add context using @filepath), you could use the mouse to click/select context objects for the prompt to execute with

sora2video 9mo ago

[dead]

nsoonhui 9mo ago

This is interesting, how do you get it done? From what I know CAD tools generally don't support text file, only binary blob which is LLM unfriendly? Do you consider adding support for AutoCAD or AutoCAD vertically integrated software like Civil 3D?

WillNickols 9mo ago
The conversation itself is sent to the LLM in regular text, and in addition it sees the feature tree (also text) and often a screenshot of whatever the current model looks like. This is usually enough for the model to know what's going on. Yes - we're likely looking into other 3D systems in the future.

iancmceachern 9mo ago

Cool, I'll check it out!!

JoeDohn 9mo ago

as mentioned below you need to go vertically on all CADs and reduce your risk. 3DS is a company that lives in 90s, they will simply turn off your access one day without any consideration. (also they have some shit AI chat thing in the "3d experience platform", so for them you are already a threat).

crobertsbmw 9mo ago

I’m just a grumpy old man, but I like having to do it the hard way. I liked having to code the hard way too. With all the AI vibe coding stuff I now feel like I’m stupid for doing it the hard way. And I probably am. I would definitely think someone else was stupid if they were using an axe to cut down a tree when there’s a chainsaw sitting right next to them. Or if someone was writing assembly code when anything else would do just fine… I guess I feel sad that the AI gets to take over a lot of the mundane but also often times relaxing and fun parts.

ipnon 9mo ago
I feel like I am still doing it the hard way, I just have to type 10x less into my keyboard to get the same amount of code out. But as soon as my understanding of the system diverges from its reality, I still do the old fashioned work of figuring out the difference and how to resolve it. It feels like a printing press replacing scribes to me.

deleted 9mo ago

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pedropaulovc 9mo ago

This is amazing! I have no CAD experience and so I tried creating my own bespoke version of LAD a while ago by crawling the SolidWorks docs into a very LLM-optimized format [1] and then asking Claude Code to write C# code using the SolidWorks SDK. Even with docs, it still struggled: functions that fail quietly, extremely verbose code and with no easy way to run tests to ensure that the results are accurate. As an example, here's the 400 lines of code it produced for an eccentric cam [2]. Attempts to close the loop by feeding CC png renders in multiple views had absolutely horrible results. Claude could not differentiate up from down, features etc. I'll try LAD tomorrow, fingers crossed it work better. [1] https://github.com/pedropaulovc/offline-solidworks-api-docs https://github.com/pedropaulovc/offline-solidworks-api-docs [2] https://github.com/pedropaulovc/harmonic-analyzer/blob/main/cad/Parts/EccentricCam.cs https://github.com/pedropaulovc/harmonic-analyzer/blob/main/...

ricksunny 9mo ago

Skip mechanical LLM; iterate on mechatronic LLM instead https://github.com/ricksher/ASimpleMechatronicMarkupLanguage https://github.com/ricksher/ASimpleMechatronicMarkupLanguage

Jemm 9mo ago

Windows Defender is flagging this as containing Sabsik.EN.A!ml

ponyous 9mo ago

Very cool and quite advanced compared to my tool. I've been working on something similar, although not an addon for SolidWorks, but a web SaaS. Initially started it as a tool to help my grandpa make some simple models (ChatGPT clicked for him SolidWorks was impossible). Still have a long way to go, but if anyone wants to try you can do it here: https://grandpacad.com https://grandpacad.com If you want more free credits send me an email and I'm happy to give you some.

skeptrune 9mo ago

Wow, this is really cool. Now I want to go and get a windows machine and solidworks license again just to play with this.

PonyoSunshine 9mo ago

Congratulations. I have been pondering myself if I could do something similar with Rhino. Is there any chance this can be adopted to other platforms like Rhino?