We've been on HN twice before with text-to-CAD/3D experiments [1][2]. The honest takeaway from those threads: prompt-to-3D model web apps are fun, but serious mechanical engineers don't want a black box that spits out an STL. They want help inside the CAD tool they already use, with full visibility and control over the feature tree.
So we built that. Adam is now a harness that integrates directly with your CAD. It reads your parts, understands the existing feature tree, and edits it for you agentically. We are now live in beta on Onshape and Fusion! [3]:
Install link Autodesk Fusion: https://fusion.adam.new/install
Install link PTC Onshape: https://cad.onshape.com/appstore/apps/Design%20&%20Documenta...
Things people are using it for today: - "Merge redundant features and clean up my tree" - "Rename every feature so the tree is actually readable" - "Round all internal edges with a 2mm fillet" - “Parametrize my model”
Along with of course, using Adam to generate CAD end-to-end!
A few things we care about that aren't obvious from the listing:
1. From the start we have always believed in CAD as code as the right abstraction. Our harness leverages Onshape's FeatureScript and Python in Fusion heavily.
2. We run an internal CAD benchmark across frontier models. There has been a massive jump in the spatial reasoning capabilities of recently released models. Particularly GPT 5.5 and Opus 4.7 [4] [5]
3. We open-sourced our earlier text-to-CAD work [6]
A note on the Anthropic Autodesk connector that shipped a couple days ago [7]: We think it's great for the space and validates the direction.
Where Adam is different:
- Model-agnostic. We pick whichever frontier model is winning on each task type from our own internal bench, instead of being tied to one lab.
- We live natively in your CAD apps and are actively building integrations across all programs
What would you want an in-CAD agent to do that nothing does today?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44182206
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45140921
[3] https://x.com/adamdotnew/status/2050264512230719980?s=20
[4] https://x.com/adamdotnew/status/2044859329329893376?s=20
[5] https://x.com/adamdotnew/status/2047795078912172122?s=20
cjtrowbridge•33m ago
This is just one example of a superior tool that's natively easy for LLMs to interact with, because the source files are just composable scripts containing lists of shapes and then lists of tools and parameters to apply to the shapes.
I wrote a simple set of system prompts you can use in any repo to show any LLM how to make SCAD files with a whole bunch of cool examples. This is just another example where walking away from the bloated, inferior feudal system of SaaS and cloud models leads to simpler processes and outcomes with superior results in less time, for free.
https://github.com/cjtrowbridge/vibe-modeling
beering•25m ago
smrq•16m ago
rspeele•6m ago
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.
fsloth•4m ago
zachdive•1m ago
See our opensource text to cad editor: https://github.com/Adam-CAD/CADAM