alt Hacker NewsText being a challenge is a symptom of the bigger problem: most people have a hard time thinking spatially, and so struggle to communicate their ideas (and that's before you add on modeling vocabulary like "extrude", "chamfer", etc)
LLMs struggle because I think there's a lot of work to be done with translating colloquial speech. For example, someone might describe a creating a tube is fairly ambiguous language, even though they can see it in their head: "Draw a circle and go up 100mm, 5mm thick" as opposed to "Place a circle on the XY plane, offset the circle by 5mm, and extrude 100mm in the z-plane"
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But, you need the ambiguity, or the AI isn't really a help. If you know the exact coordinates and dimensions of everything, you've already got an answer.
When I use Claude to model I actually just speak to it in common English and it translates the concepts. For example, I might say something like this:
I'm building a mount for our baby monitor that I can attach to the side of the changing table. The pins are x mm in diameter and are y mm apart. [Image #1] of the mounting pins. So what needs to happen is that the pin head has to be large, and the body of the pin needs to be narrow. Also, add a little bit of a flare to the bottom and top so they don't just knocked off the rest of the mount.
We need a bit of slop in the measurements there because it's too tight.
Amusingly, I did this just a couple of weeks ago and that's how I learned what a chamfer is: a flat angled transition. The adjustment I needed to make to my pins where they are flared (but at a constant angle) is a chamfer. Claude told me this as it edited the OpenSCAD file. And I can just ask it in-line for advice and so on.
I don't get the text obsession beyond LLMs being immensely useful that you might as well use LLM for <insert tasks here>. I believe that some things live in text, some in variable size n-dimensional array, or in fixed set of parameters, and so on - I mean, our brains don't run on text alone.