Comment by etskinner

> Constraints and parametrizing are the trivial parts of CAD, something you can now implement in a weekend with Claude Code

You go ahead and try that.

[dead]

Could you mock up some code to describe which you feel would be suitable to describing such a thing?

> The pull request is to delete the project

Ouch. Please don't attack someone's work this way. It's too aggressive and against the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

I'm sure you didn't intend it as an attack, but it's easy to cross into poisoning the community without meaning to. Many people have been hounded into abandoning HN because of this type of swipe, or at least into never sharing their work here. We all lose when that happens.

It's a pity, because what you wrote was otherwise a fine contribution. if you had begun your comment at the good part ("It looks like a nice alternative [etc.]") it would have been great.

This is actually what onshape is, under the covers.

The GUI is really just using their scripting primitives, etc. You can access it the same as they can, actually.

> Like editing an SVG in notepad instead of Inkscape.

Speaking of which, I would love to have parametric capabilities in Inkscape.

> "highly paramteric like fastners, gears, 3D printed boxes"

1. These parts should probably be on McMaster. If you are not using them straight from there, you better have a _great_ reason as to why not when it comes up in the design review.

2. Solidworks has Smart Fasteners, Inventor has Spur Gear Component Generator, Sketch->Extrude->Shell takes 30 seconds, so not sure why 3D printed boxes would be faster or better with this for most stuff. Also, this stuff is easily solved by things like the component library and configurations.

>I still feel like there's an unexplored space where you combine the benefits of both somehow though. Like a code-based CAD but it also has a GUI editor that stays in sync and avoids the need to type in coordinates by hand. That would be extremely difficult though.

I think you can do this if the data representation of operations and values is human readable. The simplest implementation would restrict the language/data format to operations representable in the gui.

Unlike trying to solve the "visual programming" problems, we don't need or desire Turing completeness.

Very interesting indeed!

Ha! Since you mention SVG, there is a trick!

Draw your free-hand shape in Inkscape, export to SVG, import it in FreeCAD and go from there.

I used that trick to trace a part from an image and it worked surprisingly well. Not very efficient compared to commercial tooling, but despite the clumsiness its fairly intuitive and free.

All the good commercial parametric CAD apps have an API that allow you to define models programatically to avoid repitition, or do more complicated things like ensure gear ratios are exactly correct. I'm not sure I entirely understand what you're getting at with the "stays in sync" part though.

Are you aware of Rhino 3D with grasshopper?

Over the weekend I took pictures of the four walls of my office and asked Claude Desktop to examine them and give me a plan for tackling it. It absolutely “understood” my room, identifying the different (messy) workspaces and various piles of stuff on the ground. It generated a checklist with targeted advice and said that I should be motivated to clean up because the “welcome back daddy” sign up on the wall indicates that my kids love me and want a nice space to share with me.

I vibe-code TUI and GUI by making statements like “make the panel on the right side two pixels thinner”.

Related to this thread, I explored agentic looping for 3d models (with a swift library, could be done with this Rust one by following the workflow: https://github.com/ConAcademy/WeaselToonCadova

I've found they are actually quite good at semantic geometry even if they struggle with visual or pixel-based reasoning. Since this is parametric the agent just needs to understand the API and constraints rather than visualize the final output. It seems like a code-first interface is exactly what you want for this.

Breaks down for complex parts with lots of repeated operations, suffers from floating point rounding errors. No constraint solver.

I've even already asked an LLM to generate designs in openscad, and there's plenty of examples out there. Obviously there's a complexity limit, but there's also a cheat sheet that makes it pretty easy to discover how to do almost anything that's possible within.