alt Hacker NewsThe 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
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While you're probably right about >90% of situations that fluent CAD users face, I think you might be suffering from a lack of imagination about situations where an LLM could help do work which would otherwise be tedious or mistake-prone. And then you have the non-fluent CAD users, just like the non-programmers who are now vibe-coding: this stuff can be a game changer for them even if it's far from "good" right now.
> 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.
Isn't this how a lot of machine shops operate, or how things operate internally in larger manufacturing factories? Customer/person-from-different-team comes in and explains what they want to do. Maybe they have some sketches or pictures of similar parts. Then there is back and forth with the CAD guy to build the thing.
One critical difference is that the CAD guy is usually smart and you have to explain to them things at a more high level, along with some written down hard numbers that need to be obeyed.