Comment by jhot
8 hours ago
Last weekend I bought my wife a bike off marketplace. It was in good condition but was missing one of the internal cable routing grommets. I gave Claude pictures of the pill-shaped hole by itself and with my digital calipers in the long and short directions.
Gave it a short prompt and it gave me an openscad model with everything parametrized. I printed with no changes in tpu and it was nearly perfect on the first try. Claude put in a 0.3mm subtraction in the x/y dimensions and I lowered it to 0.1 and it's perfect.
Much easier shape than ancient Roman architecture but still very cool how easy it was.
Yeah, CAD has been my personal example of "oh the barrier to entry for this skill was high enough that I didn't do it and now I can be passably bad at it enough to get some simple things done"
I've had similar experiences with making simple functional parts off a 3d printer with OpenSCAD + LLMs. I'm very aware that the models are worse at it than say, generating react code, and I'm also the antithesis of a skilled pilot. It's still cool and has resulted in me starting to learn a new skill at a hobby level.
It's like this with a lot of things now. For example, Nix's learning curve used to be a huge barrier to entry. Now with LLMs, I'm using nix-darwin and home-manager for dotfiles, package management, and have individual flakes in all of my projects for cryptographically reproducible builds!
Nit: there’s nothing “cryptographic” about reproducible builds.
“Reproducible build” already usually implies bit-by-bit reproducibility.
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Nix is also great at work. You keep the server nix code in the same repo and OpenCode can just change and test server config.
Learning to make simple parts in onshape is pretty darn easy (and fun).
Yeah. I teach this after school to 7th grade kids. Anyone can pick this up in a few hours.
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Claude does well if you can provide all dimensions. It fails at guessing though. The real magic is when you can provide one dimension or photograph with a ruler in it and the AI will figure the rest out. Right now, Claude anyways, is pretty bad at guessing.
these small functional prints are exactly where OpenSCAD and LLM generation shines
I was recently trying to get models to generate a 3D fortune cookie. Claude in three.js and Gemini in openSCAD. Neither really got the concept or could get very close at all. It's a surprisingly complex shape I guess.
with the shape you probably want something thats good at bends/fabric
cause youd start with the flat shape, the set some contraints that certain edges are colinear
Does it optimize for no support?
You optimize for no support when selecting print orientation (but for anything semi-cylindrical like described that would be the only sane orientation and the one slicer would choose when you smash the 'Auto Orientation' button).