Comment by spmcl
1 day ago
I did this a few months ago to make a Christmas ornament. There are some rough edges with the process, but for hobby 3D printing, current LLMs with OpenSCAD is a game-changer. I hadn't touched my 3D printer for years until this project.
https://seanmcloughl.in/3d-modeling-with-llms-as-a-cad-luddi...
As a MCAD user this makes me feel more confident that my skills are safe for a bit longer. The geometry you were trying to generate (minus bayonet lock, which is actually a tricky thing to make because it relies on elastic properties of the material) takes maybe a few minutes to build in Solidworks or any modern CAD package.
This matches my experience having Claude 3.5 and Gemini 2.0-flash generate openSCAD, but I would call it interesting instead of a game changer.
It gets pretty confused about the rotation of some things and generally needs manual fixing. But it kind of gets the big picture sort of right. It mmmmayybe saved me time the last time I used it but I'm not sure. Fun experiment though.