The approach I’m taking to AI augmented CAD is complimentary to the philosophy of CAD design being about the process of geometry creation over button pushing.
My Claude CAD is trained via SKILLS to understand how objects are born. The user communicates to Claude via words, sketches, drawings, pictures, even static STEP or DXF. Claude uses build123d or CadQuery to create the geometry; uses a viewer to inspect.
Infinitely more robust than trying to fine tune an LLM on b-rep training sets.
The problem AI generative CAD has is the nearly infinite variables involved with mechanical design. By nature, everything one desires to build in CAD has never before been seen in the world (unless it’s a Raspberry Pi case). Training an LLM to interpolate through the entirety of mechanical design space means an absolutely mind boggling number of training sets and somehow gaining access to proprietary design data to be of any use.
It means for AI augmentation to work for CAD, you focus on process, not raw b-rep geometry.
The road bike stem below was built by Claude, engineered by me. This specific part has never been seen before in the history of the world. It falls into well known general categories, but the specifics are new.
Anthropic and OpenAI have already done the hard work of pre-training geometric reasoning skills into their respective products. The trick is aiming this latent skill towards CAD and design engineering.
getting started in CAD is not about learning buttons.
it is about learning how objects are born.
• sketch → define the 2D logic
• constrain → remove ambiguity
• extrude/revolve → turn geometry into volume
• fillet/chamfer → make edges manufacturable
• assemble → understand how parts live together
start by modeling real objects around you.
a bracket. a hinge. a bottle cap. a gearbox.
CAD is not drawing.
it is thinking in geometry, constraints, tolerances, and manufacturing.