This is the pre-alpha/alpha release of a new CAD that I created. It uses OpenCascade 7.9 under the hood via WASM and a custom sketch solver written in typescript (substantially faster than I thought it would be)
Right now it can do most of the CAD stuff that one expects apart from anything that involves meshes or curved face manipulation - that'll come soon but I want to have a stable base first before I move any further
I hope you like it, I'm eager to hear your thoughts!
Will this project eventually be able to completely replace MechE software students need to use for classes or what is the intentions about your software’s scope
I heavily used LLM agents and it took about a month - of course I'm already starting to pay back the gained time
The development as I see it for such a project is about a year so I expect to take roughly 6 months to iron out the weird slop here and there
Having said that, the project right now is at an astonishing point and, in fear of jinxing myself, it works. Yea there are the occasional UI bugs here and there (incorrect tool grouping, incorrect tool icons, etc.) but welp, it does what I mostly want it to
Side note: I've done a similar project before and have tons of experience around building similar products, this is not an "AI success/AI will take your job" story - far from it
The opportunity to vibe code and reinforce with something like claud code for example will poach any application that thinks they have the market share and charge whatever the hell they want. I am very excited for projects like this where you leverage open source for a very specific user and offer alternatives to SAAS. Keep iterating and solidy you security and make sure you get direct feedback from experienced CAD users, which I am not. good luck
That is exactly my take, though I'm ramping down the agents for the time being - 90% of the functionality is there and it's time to pay back the engineering time that I borrowed :P
I have a lot of experience developing CAD (before the AI boom) and while it made 0 sense to burn 1-2 years of my life to produce a similar MVP, now that I HAVE this MVP, it makes a ton of sense to pour my time on it
Also I'm gonna tackle some more god-problems with agents, like reversing the sldprt/f3d filetypes to allow importing them without losing history and more - each of this would require years of engineering hours and even achieving the 80% that agentic coding does is something that has never been done before
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 39.5 ms ] threadRight now it can do most of the CAD stuff that one expects apart from anything that involves meshes or curved face manipulation - that'll come soon but I want to have a stable base first before I move any further
I hope you like it, I'm eager to hear your thoughts!
https://www.onshape.com
Whether OnShape is the "best" or not, I have no idea, but the point stands.
The development as I see it for such a project is about a year so I expect to take roughly 6 months to iron out the weird slop here and there
Having said that, the project right now is at an astonishing point and, in fear of jinxing myself, it works. Yea there are the occasional UI bugs here and there (incorrect tool grouping, incorrect tool icons, etc.) but welp, it does what I mostly want it to
Side note: I've done a similar project before and have tons of experience around building similar products, this is not an "AI success/AI will take your job" story - far from it
That is exactly my take, though I'm ramping down the agents for the time being - 90% of the functionality is there and it's time to pay back the engineering time that I borrowed :P
I have a lot of experience developing CAD (before the AI boom) and while it made 0 sense to burn 1-2 years of my life to produce a similar MVP, now that I HAVE this MVP, it makes a ton of sense to pour my time on it
Also I'm gonna tackle some more god-problems with agents, like reversing the sldprt/f3d filetypes to allow importing them without losing history and more - each of this would require years of engineering hours and even achieving the 80% that agentic coding does is something that has never been done before