Comment by akiselev

The real power with these kinds of tools isn’t prompting one shotted models but giving agents the ability to do the full workflow. You give them a description of the part and how it’s supposed to mate with parts from McMaster, Misumi, existing parts libraries, etc and the agent downloads the models, asks any clarifying questions to clear up ambiguities (using available part configurations to provide options when applicable), uses measurement tools to validate the design, provide material details for FEA, read and use PDF drawings/datasheets, and so on.

At least, that’s the theory. The problem is that none of the existing CAD tools (almost all exclusively built on Parasolid) are set up to support agentic workflows. None have proper text based representations, with the possible exception of OnShape’s feature script which is too undocumented and proprietary to be of much use. Even if it was supported, Parasolid isn’t set up to provide the kind of detailed error reporting needed to provide agent feedback.

I’ve been experimenting with this in ECAD by giving agents the ability to edit Altium files directly and it’s been working very well (even with footprint drawings!), but my attempts to do it with MCAD have fallen flat on their face because it’d require developing a geometric kernel from scratch with this workflow in mind.