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cpethyesterday at 8:00 PM2 repliesview on HN

Check out https://zoo.dev/

I went from OpenSCAD -> cadquery/build123d -> Zoo/KCL

It still is early days, and it needs some more helper functions but it's really nice having two-way capabilities (not just code -> model, but also the reverse).

Of course having Text-to-model as a first class citizen is also nice.


Replies

dbuxtonyesterday at 8:14 PM

I have played with this but been underwhelmed. However I do think probably on the right track.

I know the ecosystem not-at-all (sum total knowledge of the CAD ecosystem is that my kids got a Bambu printer for Hanukkah) but it feels to me that current LLMs should be able to generate specs for something like https://partcad.readthedocs.io/en/latest/, which can then be sliced etc.

Curious to know what others think? I come at this from the position of zero interest in developing the fine design skills needed to master but wanting to be able to build and tweak basic functional designs.

bob778yesterday at 10:20 PM

I want to like Zoo but the rendering engine is so buggy currently that it’s not really usable for more than simple shapes. The text-to-CAD feature they highlight is slow and error-prone, so much so that they explicitly use a “prebuilt” version in the tutorial, and each time I tried it, it gave tool errors or took so long I just did it manually.