[cjtrowbridge]

There are more elegant solutions to this problem. Why are you trying to get an LLM to work with bloated, archaic tools that you have to rent from a feudal lord in the cloud when there are free open-source alternatives like OpenSCAD.

This is just one example of a superior tool that's natively easy for LLMs to interact with, because the source files are just composable scripts containing lists of shapes and then lists of tools and parameters to apply to the shapes.

I wrote a simple set of system prompts you can use in any repo to show any LLM how to make SCAD files with a whole bunch of cool examples. This is just another example where walking away from the bloated, inferior feudal system of SaaS and cloud models leads to simpler processes and outcomes with superior results in less time, for free.

https://github.com/cjtrowbridge/vibe-modeling

[smrq]

Posing OpenSCAD as an alternative to the likes of Fusion is like posing MS Paint as an alternative to Photoshop. It's not even the same class of tool.

[rspeele]

In programming the best tools are open source. Nobody is using a closed source compiler anymore, for example. That can lead to an assumption the same is true in every domain. But it's not true. Closed source commercial CAD software absolutely blows the open source stuff out of the water.

OpenSCAD is a cool project and can be useful, but if you believe it's a "superior tool" to professional CAD packages like Solidworks or Fusion360, you must not have used them.

The pro software does things that are impossible or clunky in the OSS alternatives. One I frequently used in SolidWorks: loft with guide curves. SolveSpace and OpenSCAD don't even attempt to support lofts. FreeCAD does but doesn't do guide curves, so you're stuck adding more intermediate profiles to make up for that, and it's horribly easy to get your loft twisted where it's not connecting the right vertices.

Don't get me wrong, I'm very appreciative of the FOSS options, and I do get a lot of use out of them at home for small projects. I especially love SolveSpace, it is beautiful software, well thought out, fast, and its feature set is enough for 80% of my projects. But there are definitely some CAD tasks like designing a car hood or an ergonomic handle, where the FOSS software just doesn't match commercial for modeling capability. And that is not even getting into all the stuff it can do beyond modeling like FEA and CAM.

[ur-whale]

> Closed source commercial CAD software absolutely blows the open source stuff out of the water.

Very unfortunate, but true indeed.

One of my big hope is that coding with the help AI will quickly close that gap (the missing piece is a modern geometry engine like what's in Fusion, and should be reachable in an OSS context with AI-assisted coding now).

Once that happens we will be able to finally and forever escape the clutches of the likes of Autodesk.

But we're not there yet.

[zachdive]

Whilst I disagree with you (reasons mentioned in the post above), we actually have done quite a bit of work with OpenSCAD!!

See our opensource text to cad editor: https://github.com/Adam-CAD/CADAM

[fsloth]

Having worked in CAD for over a decade previously, I think the users want a product surface, and the people paying for the engineers time want a reliable trainable solution that will exist exactly as it is today in five years. They are happy to pay for it in monthly installments.

This is a separate dimension to alternative high quality modeling solutions alone.

Now, some of the users especially are _proud_ of their product specific skill set. They don't _want_ to switch a package.

And - it's much easier to get professional engineers to use extensions to packages their engineering office already uses.

And this comes before any technical side-by-side feature comparison.

[ur-whale]

>when there are free open-source alternatives like OpenSCAD.

As much as I agree with the fact that they should have built that tool for free open-source alternatives first and foremost, OpenSCAD is not the right choice.

OpenSCAD is a fantastic tool to whip together a box for your hobby electronics project, but doing serious professional CAD models ... it's just not in the same league as fusion, onshape, and freecad (as hideous as FreeCAD's UI may be).

[beering]

You won’t be taken seriously if you push OpenSCAD - it’s simply not a tool that professionals will adopt due to not doing Breps. I think the recent progress of FreeCAD and its spin-off libraries cadquery and build123d will be better to push.

[WillAdams]

Yeah, I'd love for OpenSCAD to support a kernel which supports NURBS and could output a (nice) STEP file.

There is an OpenSCAD Workbench in FreeCAD --- does it work so as to get a workable representation?

[jlarocco]

Get back to us when you've used OpenSCAD to design and build something like an airplane.

[GorbachevyChase]

Thanks for sharing. OpenSCAD skills seems like a great idea.