Well, that's the beauty of open source. Go read it.

https://github.com/xiangechen/chili3d/blob/43161b9f51021f2ef...

>When I look at this, it's so sophisticated it just makes me feel think about the widening divide as far as AI skill gap goes. Was AI used?

I feel like this was the "So tell me about your father.." turn here , did you really care about the details or did you want to wax poetic about AI?

That said, also as a teacher and a parent, I worry that Chromebooks are making kids have no idea about the world of non-web-apps. (And file systems, etc. etc.)

I watch my kid create a poster: find an image online, copy & paste into an automatic background remover, c&p into an image editing program to remove the watermark, c&p into Canva for assembling with text etc.

Meanwhile I show her that I can do the whole thing on Pixelmator Pro (or Affinity or Photoshop) and she looks at me like I have three heads.

UPDATE: On my newer laptop thius is faster than my native apps. And I was literally drawing shapes within 30 seconds of clicking on the link to this app. Compare that to the nightmare of all the other tools out there with registrations, email clutter, 2FA, and on and on. Oh, and cost in most cases!

UPDATE 2: I have no connection to this team other than having just seen a post online about this tool. I've been navigating the world of SketchUp/AutoCad/Revit recently so this of course is totally thrilling. Especially for what it means for the future.

BUT the more relevant and valuable point you made was about constraints and sketches.

And, related to this, true parametric design, which IMO is vital for a CAD package to be taken seriously.

That being said, for CAD (personal usage) I switched from Fusion 360 to Freecad 1.0 with almost no project and the latter is an order of magnitude faster.

OpenCASCADE used to be commercial, but they couldn't find enough customers to keep on and it got open sourced after a failed commercial existence.

OpenCascade

CGAL

Is there anything else?

There's also the Fornjot kernel. https://github.com/hannobraun/Fornjot

What do you dislike about FreeCAD's interface?

Making CAD more accessible seems like a massive win, in the sense that it is really hard to get hands on experience making things nowadays—hobbyist methods and professional ones have diverged quite far! Easy web-based tool that bridge that gap without playing around in the shell could be really useful.

” very old-school native programs that either are a loosely collected group of tools that allow you to manipulate files and pass them around”

Opencascade is a C++ library and manages it’s state in single process. Examples: https://dev.opencascade.org/doc/overview/html/samples.html

In the 60s, 70s, and 80s it was more true, but nowadays Catia, NX, Creo, and the other big CAD systems are monolithic applications with extensions and add-ons (either from the vendor directly, sold as third party add-ons, or developed in house with CAA/NXOpen/ProToolkit) for doing stuff like composite design, sheet metal, various types of analysis, and a million other things.

Under the hood they're very modular with hundreds (or thousands) of shared library modules, and sometimes those modules have long histories going back to the 70s, but the UI of the 70s is long gone, and they're used like normal shared libraries, not piping around data on the shell.

Not that it doesn't happen - I'm sure some companies have old tools they haven't updated in decades - but the day to day CAD work is all GUI based.

That's my impression working at a company doing CAD translation, anyway.

In a lot of large deployments, the CAD data isn't even stored in files, but in a PLM database. For example PTC's WindChill and Dassault's Enovia/3DX.

Bentley and Autodesk have a Frankenstein version of this because they can’t disrupt their revenue stream for CAD software that stopped improving 20 years ago. iTwin (yes, the branding is that bad) is an attempt to link cloud to local-file-based work. ProjectWise was a first stab at that, which is worse than plain network storage in every way except that CAD managers don’t have to be responsible for configuration scripts.

The main CAD program is often the center of use, and any specialty functionality is a add-in to the main cad program (FEA, CAM, etc).

If the specialty software is stand-alone, it still needs a CAD Kernel to be able to work with the BREP, and there are essentially only 2 main commercial kernels (Parasolid and ASICs).

https://www.cadsketcher.com/

Or maybe NASA's Vehicle Sketch Pad?

https://software.nasa.gov/software/LAR-17491-1

English (or other human) language is pretty bad at describing 3D geometry. People have been using drawings and physical 3D models to describe designs going way back into antiquity. The idea you can just use text suitable for a current-design LLM to manipulate 3D technical data really seems like an idea from someone who has never tried.

But also, Solidworks and Inventor (and I think NX) have extensive API coverage that would allow an LLM to manipulate the geometry data, if the LLM could figure out what the data meant, and what it wants to do. If you can do it on screen with a mouse and keyboard, you can likely do it over the API. An add-in could certainly be written to accept requests for information and instructions on api calls to make from an LLM.

however with opencascade working in webassembly here, perhaps also cadquery and/or build123d can do something like that