[fsloth]

Agree!

Sketching 2D shapes is a very natural way to start thinking about shapes.

That's why there is a sketch + extrude.

Here are few examples - 42 seconds to a desk organizer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VX6g5slTdeE

Or quick wavy vase.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkhAUhlg81s

The booleans and extrusion shapes are complements - both fitting different type of modeling.

Booleans are not only about shaping but also about composing individual parts to more complex assemblies.

So one can extrude few parts, then eg. combine them with a join.

[IshKebab]

Ooo that is quite impressive. You should import SovleSpace's sketcher!

What CAD kernel are you using? OpenCASCADE?

[fsloth]

Thank you!

The CAD kernel is written by me apart from the boolean solver for the meshes which is the superb https://github.com/elalish/manifold

To explain a bit more as "do your own kernel" is usually considered more mad than mad-science - this is not done on a whim. I spent over a decade doing CAD at Trimble, developing base tech and CAD offerings (including Tekla Structures and SketchUp). Happy to discuss the architecture more.

OpenCASCADE is included as part of STEP importer though.

Solvespace is a nice reference! One can already use it as prestep to modeling - just export the output as STL or SVG and import it :).

[WillAdams]

More than anything, what I _really_ want is an interactive tool which allows me to work in both 2 and 3 dimensions, tagging points/coordinates with names and then referring to them by name while applying distances/lengths and modifications such as arcs and curves.

I've been using Open(Python)SCAD: https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview but have wished for an interactive tool which would allow programmatic usage as well (apparently OnShape does this by having FeatureScript as the basis and the UI simply edits the script?).

[fsloth]

This is really good feedback.

The data model supports solving dependencies like this on the data level.

TBH I don't know at the moment how to make something like this accessible but will definitely keep it in mind.

[WillAdams]

One thought --- could you export the file as a structured XML description?

BlockSCAD does this, and I've been thinking about parsing the XML and then using that 3D structure in my own project.

[fsloth]

Theoretically, yes, but in practice a structured XML description of a parametric model is not useful in the general case without standardized format.

STEP XML would be probably the closest here.

To be realistic, I might wrap a CLI to AdaShape first, then the user could query the model and have their LLM backport the model tree to something like CadQuery :D

[tmzt]

If it helps I've been doing a lot of projects with TSX (via OCX) as a file format.

It works nicely for these things because it already supports typed parameters and can be treated as a a raw AST without JS engine.

Its also easy to manipulate with the same library.