[TaylorAlexander]

I’m sure there will be some value, especially as the LLM systems become capable of doing more of the work, but as a professional robotics engineer with a focus on mechanical engineering, OpenSCAD just cannot perform appropriately to serve as a primary CAD platform for professional mechanical design. Parametric GUI based design has so many advantages, a key one being that you can click on a feature and change it easily.

[progbits]

I think both approaches have merit, I find the ability to have proper libraries/functions (such as "place M4x8 socket head countersunk bolt here") is really nice, though I'm faster with the click&change approach for exploratory design.

However the thing holding OpenSCAD back is the fact it is CSG (basically booleans on primitives) which is just not good enough for non-trivial parts. More interesting tool is cadquery[1] which uses the OpenCASCADE b-rep kernel. Still not as powerful as commercial offerings sadly, but at least on the right path to get there.

[1] https://cadquery.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

[lincoln20xx]

I've been using build123d (based on cadquery) quite a bit and I really like it. I still use solidworks for simulations, drawings, and most fillet operations - because it turns out that doing fillets right is very non-trivial.

Code-cad is great because you get exactly what you put in, but sometimes it can feel like starting with a bucket of logic gates instead of a microcontroller.

I've had "test LLM's with code-cad" on my todo list for a while, as I think it has the possibility of greatly accelerating the production of the additional part libraries that I'd need to able to make more regular use of it.

[WillPostForFood]

Been trying to install cadquery on a mac (M1) but ouch, not easy, and not working yet.

[misnome]

FWIW conda-forge packages cadquery and it's dependencies, including on macOS-arm. So micromamba/mamba/conda can easily be used to install it. build123d is being worked on.

[WillPostForFood]

Great, thanks! I'll give it a try. Brew -> pip -> cadquery was a dead end for me.

[WillPostForFood]

Got it running, thanks again!