alt Hacker NewsI don't think I've ever heard a mechanical engineer say "torus" in my life unless they're talking about the car. When you are doing feedback with a human operator you use terms like "make this thicker" or "rotate that this way" while pointing at them. Text does not have this.
The first image on the actual paper really tells the whole story. CAD for mechanical design, by necessity, requires pretty immense specificity. It is more onerous to type out "now raise the height of the torus relative to the base 4mm" than to click on "extrude" and type 4 or drag a handle.
Injecting a natural language layer into the workflow is just not optimal. CAD itself is not a difficult tool to learn and use effectively. There are essentially no layers of abstraction that an LLM can assist in cutting through, and no obfuscated rules or languages to learn.
I think of it this way. If there was someone sitting at my computer, and I had to do all of my CAD design by explaining what I wanted them to do verbally, I'd rip out my hair.
LLMs are doing for programmers what virtual CAD did to the drafter 35+ years ago, optimizing the effort expanded to create the thing already in your brain