5 ms·

Show HN: AI CAD Harness

101 points by zachdive 5mo ago

Hi HN, I'm Zach, one of the co-founders of Adam (https://adam.new https://adam.new). We've been on HN twice before with text-to-CAD/3D experiments [1][2]. The honest takeaway from those threads: prompt-to-3D model web apps are fun, but serious mechanical engineers don't want a black box that spits out an STL. They want help inside the CAD tool they already use, with full visibility and control over the feature tree. So we built that. Adam is now a harness that integrates directly with your CAD. It reads your parts, understands the existing feature tree, and edits it for you agentically. We are now live in beta on Onshape and Fusion! [3]: Install link Autodesk Fusion: https://fusion.adam.new/install https://fusion.adam.new/install Install link PTC Onshape: https://cad.onshape.com/appstore/apps/Design%20&%20Documentation/690a8dc864e816c112aa66a0 https://cad.onshape.com/appstore/apps/Design%20&%20Documenta... Things people are using it for today: - "Merge redundant features and clean up my tree" - "Rename every feature so the tree is actually readable" - "Round all internal edges with a 2mm fillet" - “Parametrize my model” - Along with of course, using Adam to generate CAD end-to-end! A few things we care about that aren't obvious from the listing: 1. From the start we have always believed in CAD as code as the right abstraction. Our harness leverages Onshape's FeatureScript and Python in Fusion heavily. 2. We run an internal CAD benchmark across frontier models. There has been a massive jump in the spatial reasoning capabilities of recent models, particularly GPT 5.5 and Opus 4.7 [4] [5] 3. We open-sourced our earlier text-to-CAD work [6] A note on the Anthropic Autodesk connector that shipped a couple days ago [7]: We think it's great for the space and validates the direction. Where Adam is different: - Model-agnostic. We pick whichever frontier model is winning on each task type from our own internal bench, instead of being tied to one lab. - We live natively in your CAD apps and are actively building integrations across all programs What would you want an in-CAD agent to do that nothing does today? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44182206 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44182206 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45140921 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45140921 [3] https://x.com/adamdotnew/status/2050264512230719980?s=20 https://x.com/adamdotnew/status/2050264512230719980?s=20 [4] https://x.com/adamdotnew/status/2044859329329893376?s=20 https://x.com/adamdotnew/status/2044859329329893376?s=20 [5] https://x.com/adamdotnew/status/2047795078912172122?s=20 https://x.com/adamdotnew/status/2047795078912172122?s=20 [6] https://github.com/Adam-CAD/CADAM https://github.com/Adam-CAD/CADAM [7] https://x.com/claudeai/status/2049143440508616863?s=20 https://x.com/claudeai/status/2049143440508616863?s=20

Amber-chen 5mo ago
[flagged]
cjtrowbridge 5mo ago
There are more elegant solutions to this problem. Why are you trying to get an LLM to work with bloated, archaic tools that you have to rent from a feudal lord in the cloud when there are free open-source alternatives like OpenSCAD. This is just one example of a superior tool that's natively easy for LLMs to interact with, because the source files are just composable scripts containing lists of shapes and then lists of tools and parameters to apply to the shapes. I wrote a simple set of system prompts you can use in any repo to show any LLM how to make SCAD files with a whole bunch of cool examples. This is just another example where walking away from the bloated, inferior feudal system of SaaS and cloud models leads to simpler processes and outcomes with superior results in less time, for free. https://github.com/cjtrowbridge/vibe-modeling https://github.com/cjtrowbridge/vibe-modeling
- beering 5mo ago
  You won’t be taken seriously if you push OpenSCAD - it’s simply not a tool that professionals will adopt due to not doing Breps. I think the recent progress of FreeCAD and its spin-off libraries cadquery and build123d will be better to push.
  - WillAdams 5mo ago
    Yeah, I'd love for OpenSCAD to support a kernel which supports NURBS and could output a (nice) STEP file. There is an OpenSCAD Workbench in FreeCAD --- does it work so as to get a workable representation?
- smrq 5mo ago
  Posing OpenSCAD as an alternative to the likes of Fusion is like posing MS Paint as an alternative to Photoshop. It's not even the same class of tool.
- rspeele 5mo ago

101 points by zachdive 5mo ago

Amber-chen 5mo ago

[flagged]

cjtrowbridge 5mo ago

There are more elegant solutions to this problem. Why are you trying to get an LLM to work with bloated, archaic tools that you have to rent from a feudal lord in the cloud when there are free open-source alternatives like OpenSCAD. This is just one example of a superior tool that's natively easy for LLMs to interact with, because the source files are just composable scripts containing lists of shapes and then lists of tools and parameters to apply to the shapes. I wrote a simple set of system prompts you can use in any repo to show any LLM how to make SCAD files with a whole bunch of cool examples. This is just another example where walking away from the bloated, inferior feudal system of SaaS and cloud models leads to simpler processes and outcomes with superior results in less time, for free. https://github.com/cjtrowbridge/vibe-modeling https://github.com/cjtrowbridge/vibe-modeling

beering 5mo ago
You won’t be taken seriously if you push OpenSCAD - it’s simply not a tool that professionals will adopt due to not doing Breps. I think the recent progress of FreeCAD and its spin-off libraries cadquery and build123d will be better to push.
- WillAdams 5mo ago
  Yeah, I'd love for OpenSCAD to support a kernel which supports NURBS and could output a (nice) STEP file. There is an OpenSCAD Workbench in FreeCAD --- does it work so as to get a workable representation?
smrq 5mo ago
Posing OpenSCAD as an alternative to the likes of Fusion is like posing MS Paint as an alternative to Photoshop. It's not even the same class of tool.
rspeele 5mo ago