Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by benterix 72 days ago
> Autodesk has been a FAR more abusive company for FAR longer, but it's what we're stuck with - although the emergence of the BIM Workbench (Building Information Modeling) with the release of FreeCAD 1.0 [0] and the continued development of BlenderBIM (oh, now called BonsaiBIM) [1] at least gives some hope.

I believe AutoCAD is the epitome of what is wrong with Autodesk. It's expensive, there is no permanent license, there is basically no real alternative, and they aggressively go after pirated copies.

If I were a vibecoder, instead of silly toys like a half-broken compiler that nobody uses, I'd focus all my energy and tokens on creating a real Autodesk alternative. And if it really worked, including seamless witch, the authors would quickly make tons of money.

2 comments

I think at the current level of LLM code I have observed there's basically zero chance they can produce a competitive cad/cas. Maybe they could approximate an open source kernel like opencascade but I don't see the point in that when freecad already exists.
Unfortunately it looks like BricsCAD has gone the SaaS way, but they are an extremely mature alternative to classic AutoCAD 2d and 3d [0]

Additionally, Rhino has always been a good drafting tool [1] but my understanding in the current WIP (which if I'm guessing will probably be released as 9.0, within the next 6-12 months) is making a huge push to include better drafting tools. McNeel, the developer, has no plans to go to a subscription model.

[0] https://www.bricsys.com/

[1] https://www.rhino3d.com/