I am an amateur woodworker and wanted easier ways to quickly prototype ideas.
The sweet spot for me is more accurate measurements and better drawings than my pen and paper but without the overhead of firing up Fusion 360 and trying to lay out the 2D then 3D process.
Neither of the above is great for iteratively exploring designs either.
My last project was a custom drill press workbench, and I did the 3D in sketchup and Fusion to get a feel for both tools popular with woodworker hobbyists.
These types of designs are often sold for a few bucks with the project assembly videos posted on YouTube.
I did my initial testing of this using iterative prompts to OpenAI models asking them to refine the design of an outdoor wooden bench with dimensions appropriate for a toddler.
I had some live edge donor wood and wanted it to comply with the thickness of the materials as input.
I was able to prove to myself it could be done with generated scripts for the blender-API.
I set aim at single page that can record spoken audio, perform STT, process it into valid blender Python, export a .glb and display it on the same page.
Making a great demo is a lot of integration work and a lot of LLM programming, pre and post processing, system context refinement etc.
But it’s pretty awesome.
In my experience generating for Fusion is dicier than blender, but I suspect with specialized model training and a bunch of dark art LLM incantations this could become a prosumer tool, and possibly speed along professional work as described in the blog.
So far this is not stuff w complex mechanics or fancy hinges, so it might not meet the threshold of CAD for some. But there are a lot of folks who want “cad like” experiences without having to muck w the tools.
I’d love feedback if anyone is interested in checking it out. Demo day is toward end of this month, I can be reached at the email in my HN profile.