5 ms·
Launch HN: Adam (YC W25) – Open-Source AI CAD
Hey HN! I'm Zach from Adam (https://adam.new/ https://adam.new/). We're building AI agents for mechanical CAD software. We’ve built the company on two fundamental beliefs:
- AI will be the primary medium for creating mechanical designs just like it is in software today.
- The best paradigm for CAD generation is to generate CAD as code (text -> code -> CAD).
We’re building CADAM, an open source Text to CAD platform. It's a React app (TanStack Start) with a Supabase backend for auth, database, and file storage. Think of it like AI TinkerCAD.
Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iESOr7EGWqk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iESOr7EGWqk
Try it: https://adam.new/cadam/ https://adam.new/cadam/
What it does:
- Generates parametric 3D models from natural language, with support for both text prompts and image references.
- Outputs OpenSCAD code with automatically extracted parameters that surface as interactive sliders for instant dimension tweaking
- Exports as .STL or .SCAD (plus OBJ, GLB/GLTF, FBX, and DXF)
Under the hood:
- One agentic endpoint with two modes that swap system prompts and tools: a parametric mode that writes/edits OpenSCAD via a build_parametric_model tool, and a mesh mode that generates 3D textured meshes.
- Simple parameter tweaks bypass the model entirely; adjusting a slider does a deterministic regex update on the SCAD source, requiring no LLM call.
- Model-agnostic via the Vercel AI SDK: Anthropic (Claude), Google (Gemini), and OpenAI/others through OpenRouter, with adaptive thinking auto-enabled on newer models. Surprisingly, in our evals Gemini 3.1 Pro is the top model.
- Runs fully in-browser by compiling OpenSCAD to WebAssembly (in a Web Worker, so the UI never blocks) and rendering with Three.js via React Three Fiber
- Supports BOSL, BOSL2, and MCAD libraries, plus custom font support (Geist) for text in models
Future improvements:
- Support both build123d and CadQuery. This will allow us to move beyond CSG primitives to constraint-driven modeling and provide direct comparisons to other code-as-CAD primitives.
- Better spatial context: UI for face/edge selection and viewport image integration to give LLMs spatial understanding
You can clone the repo and run it locally! Contributions are very welcome.
- jacobblyons 4mo ago[dead]
- zachdive 4mo agocool! will check it out!
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- jrflo 4mo agoCan you talk more about the UI for face/edge selection that you're working on? Is that only going to be in the OnShape/Fusion plugins?
- zachdive 4mo agoIt's currently in the plugins and we're working on bringing it to CADAM. Basically you'll be able to use the GUI, and give face/edge selection context to your prompt "extrude a hole through this face". It's directly tied to us adding brep support.
- tapia 4mo agoHow can this approach be better than just selecting the edge and click the extrude button/write extrude command? Now you have to start writing a prompt and hope that what you want to do is understood by the LLM. I mean, CAD is really not so complicated with the tools we currently have. You just have to learn how to use them.
- zachdive 4mo agoThat's more of an example to address the point. We've find our users often use this feature in our onshape/fusion extensions in complex assemblies. Being able to select faces and edges as context in addition to prompts can be quite a powerful interface in more complex projects where users need to adjust tolerances or edit multiple objects to prevent interference
- tapia 4mo agoI understand the goal, but describing complex geometries with specific tolerances with natural language is much more complex than creating the geometry programmatically. There are geometries that I could not clearly describe with words, but it's clear the operations I need to do to create them. But who knows, maybe I'll be proven wrong.
- 4mo ago
- paulglx 4mo agoIt could be a nice touch to give some examples of what it's possible to ask CADAM!
- zachdive 4mo agoYes good idea! We've added a few in the read me if you'd like to take a look
- _pdp_ 4mo agoVery cool. Why not start with an MCP instead? An existing LLM could drive the generation while the MCP can render the final result?
- zachdive 4mo agoWe're intent on building a dedicated editor, that way we can build a lot of nice UI! We'd also like to build public mcps for some of the popular cad tools
- zardo 4mo agoFYI there is already a product with a very similar name, CADEM.
- q3k 4mo ago> A complete V8 internal combustion engine Yeah, no, that's a lie. This isn't a CAD model. It's a fantasy 3d model that looks like it's straight out of Gearhead Garage (1999). Any time I see these 'AI CAD' solutions it's always toys, toys, toys. Show me something functional that you've actually manufactured (shitty 3D prints don't count). Or at least show me something that can actually be assembled and isn't just a bunch of boxes with no fasteners to hold them together.
- zachdive 4mo agoWe could defo update our readme! What do you think of this?: https://x.com/aaronli/status/2064876123109089742?s=20 https://x.com/aaronli/status/2064876123109089742?s=20 Fable 5 in our Fusion Extension.
- q3k 4mo agoI see cams intersecting eachother and still nothing that is actually ready to be manufactured or even looks like a design that has had any thought put into it. It's the CAD equivalent of idle doodling. Do you have a single person on your team that's actually a mechanical engineer with practical industry experience?
- zachdive 4mo agoYes and we have a number of mechanical engineers using our extensions! AI in CAD is defo a WIP but when you trace the progress it's not too hard to envisage what the future will look like. For the Fusion demo we intentionally didn't include the block or any accessories in the visualization as we wanted demonstrate Adam's ability to reason through the mechanical workings of an engine, like how the cams push the valves or the way the the crankshaft drives the connecting rods.
- sem4 4mo agonot to say this isn't cool, but it's about as useful as having claude generate a JavaScript illustration of how a v8 works and then expecting someone to manufacturer an engine from that For anyone doing CAD at a professional level (ie not 3d printed trinkets), the important parts are the physical parameters and tolerances designed into the model. For example I suspect your crankshaft would rip itself apart at engine speeds, not to mention all the plumbing, oil and coolant delivery, and auxiliary pumps and belts are missing
- dvh 4mo agoI asked it to create 3d model of "AMF-O97L45-DB". It pulled datasheet and generated 3D model. Left is reality, right is what was generated: https://imgur.com/a/oNaz51q https://imgur.com/a/oNaz51q - wrong pitch - wrong pins position - missing pins
- bel8 4mo agodid you try to iterate? copypasting your brief message here to the prompt would probably fix something.
- zachdive 4mo agoyes i agree, this would probably fix it
- zachdive 4mo agocurious how this compares to on baseline: https://adam.new/ https://adam.new/ let me know!
- KolibriFly 4mo agoThat's why a hybrid approach is needed. The agent shouldn't be making up dimensions based on an image. It should use OCR to extract the size table from the datasheet, feed it into a parametric table, and only then map it onto the base enclosure template.
- cui 4mo agoCan you claim your product here? https://thecadhub.com/details/adam-cad/ https://thecadhub.com/details/adam-cad/
- ark296 4mo ago[dead]
- murkt 4mo agoI find all current LLMs to have pretty poor spatial awareness. It is becoming better, but still very poor. How are you dealing with that? Got any special tricks, any advice?
- zachdive 4mo agoI write about this in detail here: https://adam.new/blog/bitter-lesson-ai-cad https://adam.new/blog/bitter-lesson-ai-cad This is improving greatly in recent model releases
- murkt 4mo agoOpus 4.5-4.7 was pretty bad at it, 4.8 was a bit better, and I have not tried Fable much. So basically you have a good enough code that’s “intuitive” for a model, screenshots, and that’s it?
- 8note 4mo agofable is a fair bit better, but to an extent its that it tried more things to get an understanding of whats happening than opus does
- zachdive 4mo agoFable is considerably better from my experience: https://x.com/LLMJunky/status/2065229625702109340?s=20 https://x.com/LLMJunky/status/2065229625702109340?s=20 Fingers crossed it comes back!
- dmitriisn 4mo agobro, with all respect... your post says: "Before working at Adam I worked at an AI Lab called Adept. We trained foundation models to do actions on a computer. What does computer use now? The best general models. They just got good at it." You were working for 4 months in Adept. What could you deliver or even learn in such a short period of time? Sounds like an excuse tbh
- 4mo ago
- dgellow 4mo agoI'm pretty skeptical of AI products, but your onboarding and first design experience has been pretty awesome. I will definitely spend a bit more time experimenting with this
- 8note 4mo agowhy is text the setup, rather than sketches? pictures? ive found a process by which the llm gives me a picture, then i draw on it and hand it back works fairly well
- zachdive 4mo agoyou can upload an image or a sketch! we actually have drawing suppor in our extensions, but we've found our users use it far less than we expected!
- jurgenaut23 4mo agoWho are your users? Are you working with professionals that use similar commercial products or hobbyists? I have a hard time imagining that seasoned industrial designers prefer text over sketches… I suspect that your VLM might do a bad job at transcribing sketches into CADs, and you wrongly interpreted the adoption data as a preference for text-based interaction
- zachdive 4mo agogenerally professionals our flagship app at https://adam.new/ https://adam.new/ hobbyists and makers use CADAM
- jetter 4mo agotake a look at modelrift.com, it is built around annotating built models by basic pen and arrow tools, works fairly well ('smarter' model is significantly better)
- lukasm 4mo ago"I need an engine mount for 1999 toyota land cruiser j90 for the 1kz-te engine with a manual gearbox. Can you generate me a cad to send to a company in China to 3d print it?" "Done — I've created a heavy-duty, fully parametric engine mount bracket that fits a typical four-bolt block pattern and a single-stud chassis isolator with an alignment pin, much like what the 1KZ-TE requires." I dont think it's even close :( PS. Your entry message should be "Madam, I'm Adam" ;)
- rockostrich 4mo agoThere's already a lack of information online for simple things like torque specs. I can't imagine that a skilled professional could design the engine mounts even with if they had all of the relevant context online. As far as I know, the way that these reproduction hardware companies operate is that they have physical cars that they can design around. I have a 1993 Subaru WRX and I needed to replace the coolant header tank because mine had a bunch of leaks. I ended buying one from a specialty fab shop in the UK and I had to make a few measurements for them because there was varying bolt spacing for GC8 Impreza models.
- twosdai 4mo agoIf they AI would respond with what you just wrote, instead of "Done..." the world would be trending in a good direction.
- fkilaiwi 4mo agoI have a general question regarding 3d design using LLMs. My understanding is that all current applications have been trying to deal with 3d design/CAD as text/code. LLMs are clearly good at those but do you see this as the long term approch for 3d designs? do you see world models eventually evolving to produce 3d spaces or point clouds or CAD designs instead of doing video? is this approch explored? Congrats on the launch!
- zachdive 4mo agoI strongly believe that by scaling up LLMs we will get there. I write about this here in more detail: https://adam.new/blog/bitter-lesson-ai-cad https://adam.new/blog/bitter-lesson-ai-cad
- mips_avatar 4mo agoCool that you licensed it with GPL, what was your thinking on the license?
- zachdive 4mo agoHonestly I would've liked to MIT. It's mainly that the openscad wasm we use is GPL
- mips_avatar 4mo agoMakes sense, I keep hoping some startup will be able to crack the open licensing without limiting their business problem. Would love it if we could do a bit better than the rugpulling dynamics that are kind of common now without just giving AWS a buffet of startups to hurt.
- criddell 4mo agoCan it work from photos? I'm specifically thinking about stuff like this: https://www.tooltrace.ai/ https://www.tooltrace.ai/
- Doerge 4mo agoIs CADAM also what's used for the commercial product adam.new? How did you manage to write all those plugins? If it is also CADAM isn't stuff getting lost in the Fusion/Solidworks/Onshape -> OpenSCAD -> back process? Do constraints and everything just seamlessly import/export? Some comments here mention tolerances/functional requirements. Do you think the LLM/screenshot loop will scale to that too? Maybe rendering subassemblies individually until they make sense? Still feels like a full functioning V8 engine block needs _a lot_ of ghost-view screenshots to verify it works. What's your thoughts on a "simulation" approach, since it's not aligned with your bitter-lesson-blog-post? Are you able to reveal more about what kind of traction you have? 10s/100s/1000s of companies? Very cool open source project, and thanks for sharing so much!
- zachdive 4mo agoThe same principles of an agent writing cad as code and then visualing inspecting the output in a loop runs through all our products. Whilst CADAM uses OpenSCAD, Fusion uses Python, Onshape use FeatureScript etc.. The majority of our enterprise traction is on our flagship product: https://adam.new/ https://adam.new/ Here you can connect to your engineering software and use AI to generate: - CAD - Renderings - Slides for design review - BOM and much more!
- jetter 4mo agohttps://modelrift.com/blog/openscad-llm-benchmark/ https://modelrift.com/blog/openscad-llm-benchmark/ LLMs are still weak at spatial reasoning, but it gets better. Check out modelrift.com for another alternative
- incorene2 4mo agoWhat exactly is the use case for this? Just making pretty little 3d models? There are so many reasons why I, as an engineer, will never even attempt to use AI for mechanical design, that trying to list them all is about to give me an autistic screeching fit. Even if all I need is a simple little bracket or something, I can model that and know it's right much quicker than I can ask the AI to do it and then check it's work. There is no time savings here. Heck, for any of the stuff I need that is simple enough to plausibly ask AI to draw, I don't even bother to model in the first place, I would either sketch it with a pencil or just make the piece right off the top of my head. If it's more complicated than that, then my approach grows to include things like what stock I have available, what tooling, fixturing and machines are present, whether I can use any COTS hardware to simplify the design, the tolerancing scheme I want to use...and my output needs to include not just the model, but toleranced drawings and any other assemblies and such that are required. And besides all of that, and with love....OpenSCAD is a joke, and if you seriously try to tell me that "the best paradigm for CAD generation is to generate CAD as code", I cannot take you seriously.
- zachdive 4mo agoI agree openSCAD isn't anywhere near powerful enough for professional workflows. Hence why I framed this as AI TinkerCAD. However, you can drive any professional CAD software though code. As we drive Autodesk Fusion via python through agents.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- echoangle 4mo agoThis doesn’t seem to be for machining CAD but more like stuff you would 3D print at home
- echoangle 4mo ago> Simple parameter tweaks bypass the model entirely; adjusting a slider does a deterministic regex update on the SCAD source, requiring no LLM call. Why do you use regex for that? OpenSCAD allows you to pass data natively, no? What’s the advantage of the regex over using that?
- zachdive 4mo agoThis is so the .scad file stays the canonical state. With -D, the rendered geometry diverges from what the file says.
- vablings 4mo agosigh, another text to cad startup. You guys really don't get it; Engineering is about 5% of your time modeling in CAD. The other 95% is the actual hard annoying work. GO AUTOMATE THAT FIRST!
- zachdive 4mo agotackling all that in: https://adam.new/ https://adam.new/ don't you worry ;)
- dofm 4mo agoOpenSCAD. Oh well. :-(
- zachdive 4mo agoYou can use https://adam.new/ https://adam.new/ if you want to connect to your CAD applications or generate real breps
- c7b 4mo agoCongrats! I like the code-based CAD paradigm, but one question about that: why did you choose OpenSCAD instead of more powerful alternatives like CadQuery?
- zachdive 4mo agoMost of our users on CADAM are makers/tinkerers. Their #1 usecase is to generate a printable stl file for which openSCAD is ideal (LLMs are very good at generating it) For professional workflows you can use https://adam.new/ https://adam.new/ which can work natively in your CAD software and generate .STEP via build123d
- elgertam 4mo agoI've been using the OpenSCAD version of this for a while. This new release is a big upgrade! I wish it worked with my preferred CAD, FreeCAD. But this is neat!
- zachdive 4mo agoSweet!
- patja 4mo agoIt did a great job with this prompt. Got it done in about the time it would take me to login and load Fusion. I forgot to include the wire diameter but it made a reasonable assumption and included it in the params for edits "Make a grommet seal for a hole in an aluminum pipe where a cable goes through. The hole is 0.48 inches in diameter. The wall of the pipe is .25 inches thick. Make the seal split so it can be installed with the cable in place. Make a circular cover lip that is .2 inches across on the outside, and an inner lip to secure it that is smaller. It will be printed in flexible tpu"
- zachdive 4mo agonice!
- themgt 4mo agoJust to self-promote, we've got a very early stage project with a lot of similar ideas at https://quidities.com/ https://quidities.com/ - feel free to signup / reach out if you have real world use cases anywhere in this space - we've got a lot in the works already.
- woggy 4mo agoYou need a geometry kernel
- jing09928 4mo ago[dead]
- RajX-dev 4mo agoI am a daily user of CAD software, always wanted a ai based cad software
- melon_tsui 4mo agoThe parametric slider part is what got me. If it can actually pull good dims from a rough prompt and let me tweak, that's way better than regenerating.
- zachdive 4mo agoyup!
- guptadagger 4mo ago> long cylindrical tube. with a half sphere at one end, capping it. at the other end align a sphere next to the tube such that the vector from center of the sphere to the face of the end of the tube is perpendicular to the axis. then attach another sphere 180 degrees from that first sphere, with the same vector to plane of face of end of tube. perfect
- dev-kdrainc 4mo ago[flagged]
- jkwang 4mo ago[dead]
- tnn_YBVS 4mo ago[flagged]
- fxtentacle 4mo agoCongratulations on the launch. The propeller demo looks good :) BTW, customising gears (which are then laser cut from sheet metal) is also a common request from untechnical people who need CAD help. How do you differentiate from other open source AI CAD solutions? I’ve also had a good experience with Claude Code and CadQuery, which is a Python toolkit for generating CAD designs based on OpenCascade. I.e. what’s your moat? And given that you’re YC funded .. what’s your plan for millions in MRR? I’m asking because I would like to launch some useful open source tools myself (but for PIM, not CAD) and I just can’t figure out how to make open source sustainable, let alone profitable enough for hockey stick revenue growth. Any tips? Book recommendations?
- zachdive 4mo agoTo be completely honest CADAM is not at all a revenue driver for us. The majority of our customers are on our flagship app: https://adam.new/ https://adam.new/ which uses OpenCascade and allows you to connect to your CAD, PLM & PDM tools. We built CADAM largely to give back to community and support a tool for hobbyists and individuals.
- conor_robertson 4mo agoCongratulations on the launch! Awesome it can run locally, very helpful!!
- momoraul 4mo agoSurprised Gemini 3.1 Pro beat Claude in your evals for code-gen. Any intuition why - spatial reasoning, or just cleaner OpenSCAD output?
- zachdive 4mo agoGemini 3.1 whilst not the best agentic coding model, has extremely strong vision (which makes it reason spatially very well). Fable 5 was top for a brief moment, whilst it was around!
- KolibriFly 4mo ago[dead]
- tricky 4mo agoI need custom bumpers for some exposed bolts on a boat lift that are scratching the hell out of my pontoon. Modeling them has been on my todo for months. Saw this and after 5 minutes of prompting I have four custom bumpers printing. This is a great product. Thank you.
- zachdive 4mo agoThank you for giving it a shot!
- dmpanch 4mo agoNo matter how much I’ve experimented with similar text-to-image projects including this one - the LLMs still don’t fully understand the visual feedback loop, and the results are far from what expected. And it doesn’t matter how the task is described, whether there’s a reference, or even if there’s a part of a finished model that just needs to be integrated into another component - the resulting models may be visually close to what is required, but they are not technically accurate.
- terekhindc 4mo ago[flagged]
- adangit 4mo ago[flagged]