WillNickols (u/WillNickols)

WillNickols commented on Show HN: AI in SolidWorks trylad.com... · Posted by u/WillNickols

its_ethan · a month ago

Not sure if it's a "flaw" or not, but I always get stuck on AI + 3D design stuff with there being no dimensional information or control.

How big is that mug? Slowing it down and trying to catch some dim info the initial cylinder has a radius of ~39. Regardless of if that's default inches, that's one hell of a mug.

Sure you can scale it, but it's not great practice to design something and then just apply a scaling to get it to the intended size.

WillNickols · a month ago

All the dimensions are in mm by default, so 39 mm radius on a mug is about right. For all their flaws, the LLMs do usually provide reasonable dimensions.

WillNickols commented on Show HN: AI in SolidWorks trylad.com... · Posted by u/WillNickols

nsoonhui · a month ago

This is interesting, how do you get it done? From what I know CAD tools generally don't support text file, only binary blob which is LLM unfriendly?

Do you consider adding support for AutoCAD or AutoCAD vertically integrated software like Civil 3D?

WillNickols · a month ago

The conversation itself is sent to the LLM in regular text, and in addition it sees the feature tree (also text) and often a screenshot of whatever the current model looks like. This is usually enough for the model to know what's going on.

Yes - we're likely looking into other 3D systems in the future.

WillNickols commented on Show HN: AI in SolidWorks trylad.com... · Posted by u/WillNickols

areoform · a month ago

I have a SolidWorks Students License™©® and it's the most frustrating piece of software I have ever used. Links to tutorials don't work. And when you do manage to get one, the tutorials are designed for older versions of solidworks and point to buttons that have been moved / don't exist where the tutorial tells you to look in the 2025 version.

The UI is the inverse of whatever intuitive is. It's built on convention after convention after convention. If you understand the shibboleths (and I'm guessing most people take a certified course by a trainer for it?), then it's great, but if you don't, it really sucks to be you (i.e. me).

I would LOVE to try out what you've built, but I am afraid that if the model misinterprets me or makes a mistake, it'll take me longer to debug / correct it than it would to just build it from scratch.

The kinds of things I want to make in solidworks are apparently hard to make in solidworks (arbitrarily / continuously + asymmetrically curved surfaces). I'm assuming that there won't be too many projects like this in the training dataset? How does the LLM handle something that's so out of pocket?

WillNickols · a month ago

Every time you put in a query, LAD takes a snapshot of the current model and stores it, so you can revert whatever changes the LLM makes if it messes up.

WillNickols commented on Show HN: AI in SolidWorks trylad.com... · Posted by u/WillNickols

skybrian · a month ago

I think a good UI would be to prompt it with something like "how far is that hole from the edge?" and it would measure it for you, and then "give me a slider to adjust it," and it gives you a slider that moves it in the appropriate direction. If there were already a dimension for that, it wouldn't help much, but sometimes the distance is derived.

I'd love to have that kind of UI for adjusting dimensions in regular (non-CAD) images. Or maybe adjusting the CSS on web pages?

WillNickols · a month ago

I think that would make a lot of sense for non-CAD images, but the particular task you described there is do-able in just a few clicks in most CAD systems already. I think the AI would almost always take a longer time to do those kinds of actions than if you did it yourself.

WillNickols commented on Show HN: AI in SolidWorks trylad.com... · Posted by u/WillNickols

proee · a month ago

How about support for Fusion 360?

WillNickols · a month ago

Would you use something like this if it worked well in Fusion 360? We chose to start with SolidWorks because when talking with people in mechanical engineering, almost everyone was using SolidWorks and no one even mentioned Fusion (despite online surveys saying it's like 45/45).

WillNickols commented on Show HN: AI in SolidWorks trylad.com... · Posted by u/WillNickols

akiselev · a month ago

I've been working on this exact same thing with both Solidworks and Altium! There has definitely been a step change in Opus 4.5; I first had it first reverse engineer the Altium file format using a Ghidra MCP and was impressed and how well it worked with decompiled Delphi. Gemini 3 Pro/Flash also make a huge difference with data extraction from PDFs like foot prints or mechanical drawings so we're close to closing the whole loop on several different fields, not just with software engineering.

For the most part they still suck at anything resembling real spatial reasoning but they're capable of doing incredibly monotonous things that most people wouldn't put themselves through like meticulously labeling every pin or putting strict design rule checks on each net or setting up DSN files for autorouter. It even makes the hard routing quite easy because it can set up the DRC using the Saturn calculator so I don't have to deal with that.

If you give them a natural language interface [1] (a CLI in a claude skill, thats it) that you can translate to concrete actions, coordinates, etc. it shines. Opus can prioritize nets for manual vs autorouting, place the major components using language like "middle of board" which I then use another LLM to translate to concrete steps, and just in general do a lot of the annoying things I used to have to do. You can even combine the visual understanding of Gemini with the actions generated by Opus to take it a step further, by having the latter generate instructions and the former generates JSON DSL to that gets executed.

I'm really curious what the defensibility of all these businesses is going to be going forward. I have no plans on entering that business but my limit at this point is I'm not willing to pay more than $200/mo for several Max plans to have dozens of agents running all the time. When it only takes an hour to create a harness that allows Claude to go hog wild with desktop apps there is a LOT of unexplored space but just about anyone who can torrent Solidworks or Altium can figure it out. On the other hand, if it's just a bunch of people bootstrapping, they won't have the same pressure to grow.

Good luck!

[1] Stuff like "place U1 to the left of U4, 50mm away" and the CLI translates that to structured data with absolute coordinates on the PCB. Having the LLM spit out natural language and then using another LLM with structured outputs to translate that to a JSON DSL works very well, including when you need Opus to do stuff like click on screen.

WillNickols · a month ago

Thanks for the input! Haven't done much with Altium but it seems like you get at least somewhat of a boost for it being slightly more about the logic and less about the spatial reasoning.

2 things related to what you said I hadn't put in the original post:

1. In our experience, the LLMs were awful at taking actions directly with any of the SolidWorks API scripting formats (C#, VBA, etc.). Probably 75% of what they wrote just failed to run, and even when they had access to browse the documentation it wasn't much better. If you're getting Opus or anything else to interact with SolidWorks from the CLI, can you say more about how you're getting it to interface effectively?

2. The LLMs are indeed surprisingly bad at spatial reasoning unless prompted specifically and individually. The most notable case of this is when they need to choose the right plane to sketch on. When creating revolve features, they'll often choose the face that would've only worked if they were going to extrude rather than revolve, and when creating sweeps they'll often try to put the sketch that's going to be swept on the same plane as the path that's being swept. If you go back and ask them why they did that and point out that it's wrong, they can fix it pretty fast, but when left to their own devices they often get quite stuck on this.

WillNickols commented on Show HN: AI in SolidWorks trylad.com... · Posted by u/WillNickols

Legend2440 · a month ago

I think there's a lot of potential for AI in 3D modeling. But I'm not convinced text is the best user interface for it, and current LLMs seem to have a poor understanding of 3D space.

WillNickols · a month ago

Curious what you think is the best interface for it? We thought about this ourselves and talked to some folks but it didn't seem there was a clear alternative to chat.

WillNickols commented on Show HN: AI in SolidWorks trylad.com... · Posted by u/WillNickols

doctorpangloss · a month ago

it's definitely interesting, but the demo of the coffee mug has a lot of flaws, are there some concrete examples you can think of where the hosted LLMs really shine in this problem?

WillNickols · a month ago

Honestly, the out-of-the-box models aren't great at CAD. We were mostly trying to figure out (1) how well it could do with the best harness we could give it and (2) whether people would want and use this if it worked well.

WillNickols commented on Show HN: Erdos – open-source, AI data science IDE lotas.ai/erdos... · Posted by u/jorgeoguerra

sosodev · 3 months ago

Does it support OpenRouter? I tried configuring OpenRouter as a "local model" but it seems to silently fail.

WillNickols · 3 months ago

Not yet - we need to change the header configuration for that to work (versus connecting to local models), but we'll have it available soon.