Comment by fsloth
8 hours ago
"So why do you think a 10 kLoC vibecoded codebase will be any good engineering-wise?"
I've been coding a side-project for a year with full LLM assistance (the project is quite a bit older than that).
Basically I spent over a decade developing CAD software at Trimble and now have pivoted to a different role and different company. So like an addict, I of course wanted to continue developing CAD technology.
I pretty much know how CAD software is supposed to work. But it's _a lot of work_ to put together. With LLMs I can basically speedrun through my requirements that require tons of boilerplate.
The velocity is incredible compared to if I would be doing this by hand.
Sometimes the LLM outputs total garbage. Then you don't accept the output, and start again.
The hardest parts are never coding but design. The engineer does the design. Sometimes I pain weeks or months over a difficult detail (it's a sideproject, I have a family etc). Once the design is crystal clear, it's fairly obvious if the LLM output is aligned with the design or not. Once I have good design, I can just start the feature / boilerplate speedrun.
If you have a Windows box you can try my current public alpha. The bugs are on me, not on the LLM:
https://github.com/AdaShape/adashape-open-testing/releases/t...
Neat project, and your experience mirrors mine when writing hobby projects.
About the project itself, do you plan to open source if eventually? LLM discussion aside, I've long been frustrated by the lack of a good free desktop 3D CAD software.
Thanks man!
I would love to build this eventually to a real product so am not currently considering open sourcing it.
I can give you a free foreverlicense if you would like to be an alpha tester though :) - but am considering in any case for the eventual non-commercial licenses to be affordable&forever.
IMHO what the world needs is a good textbook on how to build CAD software. Mäntylä’s ”Solid modeling” is almost 40 years old. CAD itself is pushing 60-70 years.
The highly non-trivial parts in my app are open source software anyways (you can check the attribution file) and what this contributes is just a specific, opinionated way of how a program like this should work in 2020’s.
What I _would_ like to eventually contribute is a textbook in how to build something like this - and after that re-implementation would be a matter of some investment to LLM inference, testing, and end-user empathy. But that would have to wait either for my financial independence, AI-communism or my retirement :)
Fair enough. I was asking mostly because it looks like the current demo is Windows only. I'm trying to de-Windows my life before I'm forced onto Windows 11 and I imagine multi-platform support isn't a high priority for a personal project. I do wish you the best of luck though.
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It’s amazing how often these miracle codebases that an AI has generated are always not open source.
If you doubt it’s real just run it, man.
I shared the app because it’s not confidential and it’s concrete - I can’t really discuss work stuff without stressing out what I can share and what not.
At least in my workplace everyone I know is using Claude Code or Cursor.
Now, I don’t know why some people are productive with tools and some aren’t.
But the code generation capabilities are for real.