Teaching LLMs how to solid model

Summary

It turns out that LLMs can make CAD models for simple 3D mechanical parts. And, I think they’ll be extremely good at it soon. An AI Mechanical Engineer Code generation is the first breakthrough application for LLMs. What would an AI agent look like for mechanical engineering? Material selection, design for manufacturing, computer-aided manufacturing (CAM), and off-the-shelf part comparison would all be important features of an AI mechanical engineer. Perhaps, most importantly, an AI mechanical engineer would design and improve CAD models. Mechanical engineers typically design CAD using point-and-click software (e.g. Fusion 360, Solidworks, and Onshape). How could AI generate these solid models instead? Code generation meets CAD One promising direction is training a generative model on millions of existing CAD files. This approach is being actively researched by multiple teams who are investigating both diffusion and transformer architectures. In particular, I like Autodesk Research’s approach to encode the parametric primitives (points, curves, shapes, extrusions, etc) into a transformer architecture. However, as far as I understand, the models in these projects cannot yet take an arbitrary input command and generate a desired shape. Then a few weeks ago, I was inspired by the recent use of LLMs to drive Blender, the open source modeling tool widely used for animation. Given that LLMs are incredibly good at generating code, perhaps programmatic interfaces for CAD modeling could be used to generate solid models in a similar way. I immediately thought of OpenSCAD, an open-source programmatic CAD tool that’s been developed for more than 15 years. Instead of using point-and-click software to create a solid model, the user writes a software script, which is then rendered into the solid CAD model. LLMs rock at writing OpenSCAD To test it out, I created a simple project in Cursor, made a blank OpenSCAD script (Cursor.scad), and added some Cursor rules: # Your rule content ...