[btbuildem]

I see a lot of comments here to the effect "but it's easier to just do it in CAD in the first place" -- those are experts speaking. Imagine being a newcomer to CAD, the learning curve is quite steep. Compared to mastering the complex UI and workflows of a CAD problem, a text-based approach seems much easier.

I can see this being incorporated into existing software as an alternate workflow path.

What caught my curiosity here is the "sequential" qualifier. One massive weakness of all the AI content generation schemes is the lack of editability -- you get what you get, and attempts to refine the initial results are middling at best. This seems like it allows the user to build a more complex scene from multiple prompts -- likely meaning you can go back and edit some of the prompts to tweak the building blocks, and edit the overall scene. Interesting!

[throwgfgfd25]

> I see a lot of comments here to the effect "but it's easier to just do it in CAD in the first place" -- those are experts speaking.

This is what I think, and yet I am the longest time away from being an expert.

It's easier because CAD tools unlock CAD thinking and empower your brain to actually do design, as well as helping you see problems you didn't anticipate.

This whole area -- LLM to CAD -- is one of the most misguided applications for generative AI (beyond "generative design" as it was understood in the pre-LLM/pre-GAN era, where it was usually used for FEM/topology optimisation)

There are already enormous libraries of freely available basic CAD models for real-world objects; any beginner would be much better off simply learning how to merge them. And any tool aimed at beginners would be better off assisting that process (TinkerCad does, for example)

And if a beginner has a truly novel object to make, an LLM is not going to have the training set data to make it. Nor is the beginner likely to have the CAD knowledge (words, expressions) to describe it.

For this to be of use to a beginner you do have to imagine quite a niche kind of beginner: one who is expert in descriptive language and advanced geometry. Those people would be better off learning some sort of CAD environment; indeed they are the niche that is least likely to be driven insane by the limitations of OpenSCAD.

[imtringued]

I don't know why there is so much demand to avoid learning simple and easy to learn things that require very little upfront time investment (with the exception of FreeCAD of course). That text based interface has its own learning curve. You're not really saving time in the long run. You're just procrastinating the easy part of CAD.

[throwgfgfd25]

> You're just procrastinating the easy part of CAD.

But this is actually like a lot of LLM applications. For example: it's not terribly hard to learn to write a song; you don't even need to know an instrument. The songs LLMs write aren't better than novice songwriters. The difficult bit is turning a basic song into a great song, and novices who've skipped writing the song itself won't be better at it.

[userbinator]

I wouldn't consider CAD UI to be "complex". It's not too different from any vector image editor, except for a third dimension.