OpenSCAD is a cool project and can be useful, but if you believe it's a "superior tool" to professional CAD packages like Solidworks or Fusion360, you must not have used them.

The pro software does things that are impossible or clunky in the OSS alternatives. One I frequently used in SolidWorks: loft with guide curves. SolveSpace and OpenSCAD don't even attempt to support lofts. FreeCAD does but doesn't do guide curves, so you're stuck adding more intermediate profiles to make up for that, and it's horribly easy to get your loft twisted where it's not connecting the right vertices.

Don't get me wrong, I'm very appreciative of the FOSS options, and I do get a lot of use out of them at home for small projects. I especially love SolveSpace, it is beautiful software, well thought out, fast, and its feature set is enough for 80% of my projects. But there are definitely some CAD tasks like designing a car hood or an ergonomic handle, where the FOSS software just doesn't match commercial for modeling capability. And that is not even getting into all the stuff it can do beyond modeling like FEA and CAM.

This is a separate dimension to alternative high quality modeling solutions alone.

Now, some of the users especially are _proud_ of their product specific skill set. They don't _want_ to switch a package.

And - it's much easier to get professional engineers to use extensions to packages their engineering office already uses.

And this comes before any technical side-by-side feature comparison.

See our opensource text to cad editor: https://github.com/Adam-CAD/CADAM

As much as I agree with the fact that they should have built that tool for free open-source alternatives first and foremost, OpenSCAD is not the right choice.

OpenSCAD is a fantastic tool to whip together a box for your hobby project, but doing serious professional CAD models ... it's just not in the same league as fusion, onshape, and freecad (as hideous as FreeCAD's UI may be).

As far as sketch constraints go we are currently working on making this robust!

https://onshape-public.github.io/docs/auth/limits/

So it should be ok ?

Asking seriously.

Context: Have some overlapping interest in the space because I am prototyping a camera based edge device that allows for AR/AI interactions.

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.

I seem to see one or two of these CAD projects a week. It’s cool, but the real value is design automation specific to my problem domain. Modeling isn’t usually that hard if you’re comfortable with the software. It would probably take as long to just think about what you need. I find more difficulty in maintaining coherence in complex projects that doesn’t involve me forcing a whole team to go all in on some stupid PaaS. A tip for founders: if you’re adding steps to the work process, you’re not helping.