ES version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.
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
Install link PTC Onshape: 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
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45140921
[3] https://x.com/adamdotnew/status/2050264512230719980?s=20
[4] https://x.com/adamdotnew/status/2044859329329893376?s=20
[5] https://x.com/adamdotnew/status/2047795078912172122?s=20
Discussion (60 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
At least, that’s the theory. The problem is that none of the existing CAD tools (almost all exclusively built on Parasolid) are set up to support agentic workflows. None have proper text based representations, with the possible exception of OnShape’s feature script which is too undocumented and proprietary to be of much use. Even if it was supported, Parasolid isn’t set up to provide the kind of detailed error reporting needed to provide agent feedback.
I’ve been experimenting with this in ECAD by giving agents the ability to edit Altium files directly and it’s been working very well (even with footprint drawings!), but my attempts to do it with MCAD have fallen flat on their face because it’d require developing a geometric kernel from scratch with this workflow in mind.
It is quite impressive putting in a raw prompt and watching the model just one-shot it though: https://x.com/adamdotnew/status/2050264512230719980?s=20
I seem to see one or two of these CAD projects a week. It’s cool, but the real value is design automation specific to my problem domain. Modeling isn’t usually that hard if you’re comfortable with the software. It would probably take as long to just think about what you need. I find more difficulty in maintaining coherence in complex projects that doesn’t involve me forcing a whole team to go all in on some stupid PaaS. A tip for founders: if you’re adding steps to the work process, you’re not helping.
Asking seriously.
Context: Have some overlapping interest in the space because I am prototyping a camera based edge device that allows for AR/AI interactions.
Or these days, Dynamo?
I have been working on GrandpaCAD[0] for a while, a very similar product. I thought of you as my biggest competitors but noticed recently you are focusing more and more on professionals while I am focusing on total noobs in modeling who just want to whip out a quick model. So I guess we are not competitors anymore?
My evals[1] show that Opus 4.7 and GPT 5.5 are very comparable in terms of generation quality, but GPT 5.5 is slower and costs sooo much more in my harness. And the original breakthrough model was Gemini 3.1. I'm curious do you have more written about your benchmarks setup?
If you want to chat email is in my profile. Btw, just met "your"(?) neighbour on a plane a couple of days ago. World is small.
[0]: https://grandpacad.com
[1]: https://grandpacad.com/en/blog/public-benchmarks-misled-me-o...
An automated drafting too where I can describe design intent and requirements would be a million times better, especially if it is CAD context aware.
I would say around 5-20% of mENG is not actually modelling, the endless pursuit of text to cad and other ai works is both not helpful and not enjoyable
(PS: The feature tree renaming does look very useful)
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47411437
We abstract pretty much everything down to two simple primitives: CAD as code + visual feedback
Would a more CAD-as-code based approach to CAD design be more suitable?
Just like, LLMs have an easier time to build a presentation with latex than with powerpoint...
Here you can see how code drives the modeling
And does this use your OnShape API quota? If it's making a new API call for each individual feature, I could see this blowing through the annual quota very quickly. What does this look like in practice?
As far as sketch constraints go we are currently working on making this robust!
Calls made with OAuth2 via applications that are publicly available in the Onshape App Store
https://onshape-public.github.io/docs/auth/limits/
So it should be ok ?
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
See our opensource text to cad editor: https://github.com/Adam-CAD/CADAM
This is a separate dimension to alternative high quality modeling solutions alone.
Now, some of the users especially are _proud_ of their product specific skill set. They don't _want_ to switch a package.
And - it's much easier to get professional engineers to use extensions to packages their engineering office already uses.
And this comes before any technical side-by-side feature comparison.
OpenSCAD is a cool project and can be useful, but if you believe it's a "superior tool" to professional CAD packages like Solidworks or Fusion360, you must not have used them.
The pro software does things that are impossible or clunky in the OSS alternatives. One I frequently used in SolidWorks: loft with guide curves. SolveSpace and OpenSCAD don't even attempt to support lofts. FreeCAD does but doesn't do guide curves, so you're stuck adding more intermediate profiles to make up for that, and it's horribly easy to get your loft twisted where it's not connecting the right vertices.
Don't get me wrong, I'm very appreciative of the FOSS options, and I do get a lot of use out of them at home for small projects. I especially love SolveSpace, it is beautiful software, well thought out, fast, and its feature set is enough for 80% of my projects. But there are definitely some CAD tasks like designing a car hood or an ergonomic handle, where the FOSS software just doesn't match commercial for modeling capability. And that is not even getting into all the stuff it can do beyond modeling like FEA and CAM.
Very unfortunate, but true indeed.
One of my big hope is that coding with the help AI will quickly close that gap (the missing piece is a modern geometry engine like what's in Fusion, and should be reachable in an OSS context with AI-assisted coding now).
Once that happens we will be able to finally and forever escape the clutches of the likes of Autodesk.
But we're not there yet.
As much as I agree with the fact that they should have built that tool for free open-source alternatives first and foremost, OpenSCAD is not the right choice.
OpenSCAD is a fantastic tool to whip together a box for your hobby electronics project, but doing serious professional CAD models ... it's just not in the same league as fusion, onshape, and freecad (as hideous as FreeCAD's UI may be).
It does not integrate with "my" CAD, which happens to be none of the two closed-source, closed-ecosystem, commercial products you built your tool for.
Depends on what I'm doing, but for serious projects, I try to stick to FreeCAD (which has a python API btw) and avoid the commercial packages whenever I can.
Like others have remarked, the feature set, in particular of the geometry engine, is really not at the level of commercial packages like Fusion, Onshape and the rest, but 90% of the time FreeCAD is good enough.
However, FreeCAD's UI is truly an abomination, even with the recent "improvements". The workflow enforce by the package is a freaking death march.
[EDIT]: I am also a huge fan of building objects with code, especially for parametric stuff, but then there is nothing out there that can really do the code -> model -> 3D viz -> code -> model -> ... loop tightly enough yet.
I truly believe that AI + CAD is blue ocean territory, but please, please don't make the lock-in the already predatory actors in the space have on the market even worse by building your stuff for their product.
Especially, don't help Autodesk, they're a freaking cancer on the industry.
If we could drive FreeCAD using an AI, man that would really rock and make a huge difference for the recognition of the package, especially if you figure our a way to have users work around the horrible UI.
I kind of cautiously disagreed. He told me that the applications he used had no tooling for AI.
I basically said "give it six months". I think in my googling now, it's already here.
In case you are interested: https://lucasgerads.com/blog/lecroy-mcp-spice-demo/
I will post more updates soon.
Basically, unless the legacy eCAD companies decide to add it themselves, there's too much pain involved in switching tools — and even with that caveat, Cadence specifically is too much of a dinosaur to integrate it effectively anyway.
That said, there's a big distinction depending on whether your friend works primarily on the schematic or layout side.
A lot of the people who post online have no experience with the paid PCB tools and those tools already have quite a lot of automation, and the automation interfaces work between different CAD & EDA vendors. Shared, hierarchical, and repurposed schematics are also totally a thing.
I spend almost no time on boiler plate stuff. And with good constraints, which require serious thought and understanding, tons of routing & checks can be automated too. Right now.
So, IMHO, there is not a lot of fat in the process for AI to automate away without a lot more EE and physics models, and the ability to interpret multiple specs, built in. And the current AI tools are very far from that.
Not to mention the level of customization and tooling that companies like Apple have themselves built out around the PCB tool. Playing around with Cadence at home is going to be a different experience than using it at a large tier1 company.
I was mostly sticking with more systemic factors against AI adoption, but I agree with you completely.
As you said, professional PCB design has largely automated the easy stuff, and the hard stuff is going to be largely illegible to an LLM. A competent engineer could route a 10L HDI board which powers on in under a week, getting it ready for mass production is what takes the other 8+ months and 5 design spins, and I don't see much opportunity for AI to help there.