The article summarizes the functional parts so well. What is very hard to communicate is the feeling of space, especially in the top floor with the books. It's sort of unique, and recommend a visit anyone traveling nearby.
I worked at the company that developed the software used to design the construction of Oodi (Trimble/ Tekla Structures). It's so awesome to walk through a building you know the tool you helped to build, helped to build :D
> Consumer don't care if the OS is proprietary, as long as it works
I agree entirely (and they also don't even care if there's a trustable party who they can trust, just look at how many people happily use Google).
And this is exactly the mentality that's gotten us where we are. Consumers don't care about these things, and then end up lock into vendor ecosystems like the one op is describing here.
This is super interesting! Thanks for sharing. I’m wondering myself how to put up a site with usual product stuff, blog and manual.
The blog is running already on hugo on full llm automation but I had though it would not work for documentation (this is for non-techies so want something more product-manual -like and less SDK-docs flavour) or landing page that well.
Yes, we just launched FORMATION XYZ a few days ago. Thanks! Fully running on hugo and I used the search library as well because it seems to work really well.
Interesting facts:
- the domain was registered a few weeks ago
- most of the heavy lifting was done by our non technical CEO by prompting codex; not by me.
- he got a bit carried away with some features and he was able to pull off a little robot (powered by vector search and embeddings), audio transcriptions, and a few other nice features. He has a product/ux background and a good eye for detail but no coding skills whatsoever.
- we use a lot of skills and guard rails to guide content generation, SEO optimization, etc. Our SEO agent does competitive analysis on a schedule, figures out optimal SEO phrases and maintains a list of approved SEO language.
- our content generation skills guard against typical AI slop smells, weaves in SEO language where possible, and uses a sub agent to act as harsh critic on content. AI slop only happens if you let it happen. You can see on the querylight documentation site that I have a bit more of that there. I need to improve the skills for that one.
If you want to get your feet wet with this, I would just recommend doing it and start with simple changes. Use Claude Code, Codex, or whatever you prefer.
One of the first successes I had with another website was "add the logo for company x to the logo wall". It went off and figured out the website, got the logo svg, figured out where to put it and hooked it up in the right place. For me that was a oh "it can do that now" kind of moment. A lot of content changes are like that.
Probably; if it has an API you can probably get coding tools to use it. But the point of using agentic coding tools is that they are really good at working with code and files. And it tends to be a lot faster and easier. And you can build tests and browser tests around that as well.
In my view, a CMS is intended for people doing stuff. If you transition that stuff to AI Agents, why keep the CMS around? And if AI does all/most of the coding, it's not such a big leap for non technical people to get their hands dirty anymore.
https://www.adashape.com/ - a humanistic CAD for 3D printing. Early but has profile editor, extrusions, booleans, and imports STL, STEP, SVG and bunch of visual mesh formats.
Yes - supporting full manufacturing intelligence is part of the larger vision (in practice quite far off).
I don't think there is need to unseat anyone. 3D modeling market is expanding and the intent is to serve people for who are not users of current market leading tools. There are tons of plausible UX paradigms that have not been explored. This is one such exploration :)
"like could you make it aware of the fdm limits and help me avoid them while im building "
That's part of the long term vision. First solve modeling, then solve manufacturing of the models reliably.
The modeling already follows this principle - you can't model things the rest of the operations can't support.
> As a person who has crashed and burned with every. single. traditional 3D CAD tool
I hear you, there are reasons for depth and complexity but not every program needs to be like that.
>if this is a good fit, will gladly pitch in using this for 3D.
I notice you are discussing specifically CAD/CAM for CNC routers. I don't know if this is applicable for your use case or not. Would be very interested to hear your opinion!
The output is a tessellated 3MF mesh. The tessellation accuracy can be tweaked to be as precise as needed, so if that's the only constraint this may be applicable.
Thank's for raising the manual! I'll have to invest more time into it :)
The commercial program MeshCAM has long been the poster child for using an STL for 3D CAM, and it can work well, though is vulnerable to faceting as discussed at:
The output resolution as such can be made "arbitrarily" precise if the model geometry is authored within AdaShape. So the facets in your image would not result from the limitation of the generated mesh (https://www.cnccookbook.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/facet...).
There resolution is currently fixed to presets for usability (see p. 28 of the changelog for the tolerance values - https://github.com/AdaShape/adashape-open-testing/releases/d...). I did not have CAM/CNC expert to consult on the details so those may be out of whack (but I'm happy to adjust them or add a user configuration).
"if it's a good fit, maybe I can take the manual off your hands?"
I've been using as low end testing machine my Thinkpad T14 Gen2 i5. I think you have the same iGPU (Iris XE) but the resolution in the Thinkpad is 1920x1080 while I think you have 2880 x 1800 screen (guessing, please verify :) ) .
If you are inclined to continue testing dropping the resolution or making the window smaller _might_ help. Also it's expected the user has a SSD.
My other testing platforms are a desktop rig with 4k screen/ 3080 GPU and Windows Sandbox (the latter being super sluggish). I've not tested on igpu with WQHD+ resolution - will definetly add this to my test matrix in the future. But don't know if I can help you right now.
This is great feedback btw. for alpha version regardless to whatever conclusions you come on the applicability.
The smaller window is much more performant, so it would seem to be the pixel allocation which causes this --- except, I'm getting a delay when dragging to rotate w/ a stylus which I don't see when using a trackpad.
Arguably, Moment of Inspiration 3D and Shapr3D have fully eaten up the "3D modeling program designed for use w/ a stylus (or Apple Pencil)" market, but there are _dozens_ of us! If possible, please test w/ a stylus and keep that usage in mind --- it's a good fit for the creative sorts who would use it.
If you want some "Blue Water Sailing", it might be that doing a version for Android would offer a market free of competition, and there are innovative devices there such as the Wacom Movink Pad 14 (which can also be used as a display tablet on Windows/Mac devices I believe).
To explain a bit more as "do your own kernel" is usually considered more mad than mad-science - this is not done on a whim. I spent over a decade doing CAD at Trimble, developing base tech and CAD offerings (including Tekla Structures and SketchUp). Happy to discuss the architecture more.
OpenCASCADE is included as part of STEP importer though.
Solvespace is a nice reference! One can already use it as prestep to modeling - just export the output as STL or SVG and import it :).
More than anything, what I _really_ want is an interactive tool which allows me to work in both 2 and 3 dimensions, tagging points/coordinates with names and then referring to them by name while applying distances/lengths and modifications such as arcs and curves.
I've been using Open(Python)SCAD: https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview but have wished for an interactive tool which would allow programmatic usage as well (apparently OnShape does this by having FeatureScript as the basis and the UI simply edits the script?).
Theoretically, yes, but in practice a structured XML description of a parametric model is not useful in the general case without standardized format.
STEP XML would be probably the closest here.
To be realistic, I might wrap a CLI to AdaShape first, then the user could query the model and have their LLM backport the model tree to something like CadQuery :D
I am fine with a representational XML which depicts the contents of the tree with the data for each node --- my idea is I would parse the XML and re-create the structure inside my program (which is pretty much what I had in mind for supporting BlockSCAD).
I would like a way to take a 3D model which has been made in an interactive tool such as your tool or BlockSCAD, then export the descriptive representation (so the 2D and 3D geometry and parameters and instructions for interaction) as an XML file (BlockSCAD does this as its "native" format, allowing one to save a design locally and reload it.
Then, I would import that into my project, parse the geometry and instructions for processing it so as to create a 3D model, then I would work through the toolpaths necessary to cut the part thus described using G-code. Or, at least, that's what I would like to try to do. I'll have to give it a whirl w/ BlockSCAD if nothing else.
I’ve had good, alternative experience with my sideproject (adashape.com) where most of the codebase is now written by Claude / Codex.
The codebase itself is architected and documented to be LLM friendly and claude.md gives very strong harnesses how to do things.
As architect Claude is abysmal, but when you give it an existing software pattern it merely needs to extend, it’s so good it still gives me probably something like 5x feature velocity boost.
Plus when doing large refactorings, it forgets much fever things than me.
Inventing new architecture is as hard as ever and it’s not great help there - unless you can point it to some well documented pattern and tell it ”do it like that please”.
"WPF had made a bet on then-advanced graphics hardware for reasonable performance, and that was bad for these users. "
OTOH WPF is today surprisingly strong GUI platform if you just want to get your Windows GUI out there.
It runs really nicely even on low end hardware. All the nice styling and blending techniques now _just work_ even on the most cheap low end laptop.
The fact it's over decade old means all the LLM:s actually know really well how to use it.
So you can just guide your LLM to follow Microsoft best practices on logic development and styling and "just add this button here, this button here, add this styling here" etc.
It's the least annoying GUI development experience I've ever had (as a dev, non-designer).
Of course not portable out of the box (avalonia is then the ticket there).
If you want 3D, you can just plug in OpenTK with OpenGL 3.3. Decades old _but good enough for almost everything_ if you are not writing a high perf game.
Really, WPF plus OpenTK is a really robust and non-surprising development platform that runs from old laptops (eg. T14 Gen 2 per my testing) onwards.
I've been doing a sideproject using WPF and OpenTK - .net works really great - here is a sample video of the whole stack (from adashape.com)
The article summarizes the functional parts so well. What is very hard to communicate is the feeling of space, especially in the top floor with the books. It's sort of unique, and recommend a visit anyone traveling nearby.
I worked at the company that developed the software used to design the construction of Oodi (Trimble/ Tekla Structures). It's so awesome to walk through a building you know the tool you helped to build, helped to build :D
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