Comment by throwup238

I think you’re jumping too fast to the “vibe CADing” extreme. It’s been a while since I’ve used Solidworks in anger so I’d rather use ECAD as an example: I’d kill for the ability to give Altium a PDF datasheet and have it generate footprints or schematic components tailored to my specific pinout for a microcontroller. Or give it a pdf of routing guidelines and have it convert those to design rules tied just to those nets. Those are the details that take up most of the time (although I’d still spend quite a lot of tine verifying all the output).

In MCAD it’s less of a problem because all the big vendors like Misumi, McMaster, et al have extensions or downloadable models but anything custom could probably benefit from LLMs (I say this as someone who is generally skeptical of their vision capabilities). I don’t think vibe CADing will work because most parts are too parametrized but giving an AI a bunch of PDFs and a size + thickness is probably going to be really productive.