[dofm]

Except that there is no application for AI in CAD that is better, more appropriate, more robust or more sensible than learning how to use a CAD package and doing it yourself.

It's not fast-changing, it's not abstract, it's just not that difficult, and where it is difficult, the AI cannot help you, because it is not capable of things you are capable of.

Learn CAD yourself. Honestly; I was sure I would never manage to learn CAD but it turns out to be interesting, rewarding, valuable and actually quite quick to learn.

An LLM certainly is not going to be able to do it better than you once you have a tiny bit of experience. (PCB design, perhaps, has a language to it that an LLM can make a bit more headway into, but as a non-PCB-designer I would still bet that it's more like CAD than code)

[timacles]

This is a refreshing perspective because recently I feel like I’m surrounded by people who think they can effectively implement complex software, just by hammering the best models.

It has been hard to explain that they are in fact just creating toy versions and there is no way they can do it without learning the underlying architecture. But they just keep going wasting 100s of dollars , lost in a sea of bugs

[dofm]

Until a few years ago I'd have been the person who thought you could make a text-to-CAD system scale up to all of it. And then I tried to make stuff I wanted.

Dabbled with OpenSCAD as we will. I decided to learn FreeCAD and what I discovered is that, even putting aside FreeCAD's many documented issues, parametric GUI CAD is not an imprecise, clumsy or fiddly way to work.

It is expressive, precise, generally capable of all the things that code-CAD can do and much more, and it's much, much quicker to work in, once you've learned a few core principles.

As you say, there is an underlying architecture; it's not just a sort of 3D paint package.

The problems the text-as-whatever crowd have are all Dunning-Kruger things in the truest sense.

People who are unaware they are unskilled in a particular technology are unlikely to successfully replace it with another. Particularly one that requires describing the problem domain in precise language.

Quite often when you see text-to-CAD discussions, especially here, there's evidence of profound misunderstandings from the people who think they are going to automate it. They assume their frustrations with the tools stem from limitations of the tools, not from the limits of their understanding.

As a person with decades of experience of code I have found learning how to use LLMs effectively to be much, much harder than learning CAD.