Comment by geor9e
2 months ago
I get that CAD interfaces are terrible - but if I imagine the technological utopia of the future - using the english language as the interface sounds terrible no matter how well you do it. Unless you are paraplegic and speaking is your only means of manipulating the world.
I much prefer the direction of sculpting with my hands in VR, pulling the dimensions out with a pinch, snapping things parellel with my fine motor control. Or sketching on an iPad, just dragging a sketch to extrude is to it's normal, etc etc. These UIs could be vastly improved.
I get that LLMs are amazing lately, but perhaps keep them somewhere under the hood where I never need to speak to them. My hands are bored and capable of a very high bandwidth of precise communication.
I’m not sure that CAD interfaces are terrible, it’s just hard work
That's what they would have said about drafting tools in the 1880s, command line AutoCAD in the 1980s. Try to imagine the 2080s, or the most visionary sci-fi movie about that future - one of those movies where people look back and says "wow they were close!". Suppose a character wanted to get an idea for a three-dimensional form from their brain onto some medium. They're not going to be clicking a plane, clicking sketch, clicking some lines, tapping the dimension hotkey, twisting their spacemouse a bit with their left hand, clicking extrude, dragging, tapping into their numpad the height, etc etc. We use the clunky interface of our age.
Perhaps, but the hard part about CAD to me isn’t the interference, but rather the specification of the geometries and the dependency structure. That’s the hard part that’s hiding in the background. It’s kind of like getting stuck on the syntax of a programming language instead of being worried about the semantics