Comment by sarchertech
18 days ago
> I’ve been wanting to develop a plastic -> silicone -> plaster -> clay mold making process for years, but it’s complex and mold making is both art and science. It would have been hundreds of hours before, with maybe 12 hours of Claude code I’m almost there (some nagging issues… maybe another hour).
That’s so nebulous and likely just plain wrong. I have some experience with silicone molds and casting silicone and other materials. I have no idea how you’d accurately estimate it would take hundreds of hours. But the mostly likely reason you’ve had results is that you just did it.
This sounds very very much like confirmation bias. “I started drinking pine needle tea and then 5 days later my cold got better!”
I use AI, it’s useful for lots of things, but this kind of anecdote is terrible evidence.
You may just be more knowledgeable than me. For me, even getting to algorithmic creation of 4-6 part molds, plus alternating negatives / positives in the different mediums, was insurmountable.
I’m willing to believe that I’m just especially clueless and this is not a meaningful project to an expert. But hey, I’m printing plastic negatives to make silicone positives to make plaster negatives to slip cast, which is what I actually do care about.
I had no idea you were talking about algorithmically making molds.
You’re just talking about taking a positive 3d model and automatically creating a mold for it that you 3d print?
If so I wouldn’t want that to be algorithmic because that’s never going to work in the general case. There are just too many edge cases that you have to manually handle. Might as well just create the mold in your CAD program.