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by FeepingCreature 55 days ago
This is funny because I was in the same situation, and actually used Claude to make a custom CAD program inspired by OpenSCAD :) https://fncad.github.io

You definitely need to have a strong sense of code design though. The AIs are not up to writing clean code at project scale on their own, yet.
1 comments
LeCompteSftware 55 days ago
This is a good example of what I mean! fnCAD appears to be a significantly buggier and highly incomplete version of OpenSCAD, where AI essentially grabbed the low-hanging fruit - albeit an impressively large amount of fruit - and left you with the hard parts. I fail to see how this solved any problems. Maybe it was an experiment, which is fine. But it's not even close to a viable CAD product, even by OpenSCAD's scruffy FOSS standards, and there's no feasible way to get it there without a ton of human work.

Not trying to denigrate the work here, as such. But this certainly didn't convince me that using AI to replace OpenSCAD (or any other major open-source project) is a good idea. The LLMs still aren't even close to being able to pull it off.

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FeepingCreature 54 days ago
It solves all my problems! It's buggy and incomplete because it's "1.0 feature complete" for my own use. I've been doing lots of 3D printing with it, so it's definitely being dogfooded. File bug reports? I'm confident that features can be added as required, it's reasonably clean code.

I mean, to be fair, a one-user project is not ever going to be as bugfree as a tens-of-thousands-of-users project. That's just inherent and not an AI issue. If you judge AI projects by that standard, they'll always come up short. It's a sampling issue. An AI project that's gotten to a level where it competes with a traditional project will always be buggier and less feature complete and polished, because AIs speed up development. It will simply have seen far less, well, polish to get there.

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