Ask HN: CAD for Woodworking with LLM Support?
Ask HN: CAD for wood working with LLM support?
I'm a hobbyist woodworker and I manually design simple things in Shapr3D with a lot of patience. I wonder if there's an effective way to accelerate 3D model design using AI in the time of LLMs. Has anybody tried using AI to model wood projects? Any tools to recommend?
I'm building ShopSpec (https://shopspec.io/) for this kind of workflow. I'm a woodworker and use it for my own home and shop builds. It's a woodworking domain engine and parametric furniture builder focused on projects like bookshelves, cabinetry, and shop furniture. It works out the parts, joints, cut list, etc. There is an MCP component in beta (https://shopspec.io/agents) that allows an agent to explore designs while the engine still does the math. To take a design to CAD, a project can be exported as DXF or as a Ruby script that rebuilds it in SketchUp Pro. It's narrower than Shapr3D, but it might fit the projects you describe.
Not yet fully baked, but I am planning to add a woodworking mode to claydash with natural cutting UI - For now I have a couple of wood materials and there is the ability to extrude + cut faces à la sketch up, which should work for simple projects. The local version has a MCP server. see https://claydash.com/
I'm a developer and hobbyist woodworker too :) I'm also the developer of FluidCAD. It has an MCP you can wire to any LLM. It runs locally on your machine. It is still missing features for splitting the model into parts, but that is coming in a future release. https://fluidcad.io/ MCP config (node.js required): https://fluidcad.io/docs/cli/#fluidcad-mcp
- variodot
I'm building ShopSpec (https://shopspec.io/) for this kind of workflow. I'm a woodworker and use it for my own home and shop builds.
It's a woodworking domain engine and parametric furniture builder focused on projects like bookshelves, cabinetry, and shop furniture. It works out the parts, joints, cut list, etc.
There is an MCP component in beta (https://shopspec.io/agents) that allows an agent to explore designs while the engine still does the math. To take a design to CAD, a project can be exported as DXF or as a Ruby script that rebuilds it in SketchUp Pro.
It's narrower than Shapr3D, but it might fit the projects you describe.
- taylorfinley
Give my tool a try, https://sawdust.diy
- evek
I’m using Plasticity with an MCP and Astra for 3D printing work, haven’t tried it for woodworking projects yet. It’s decent at modeling medium complexity enclosures and structural supports, so might be worth giving it a try.
- janne-alatalo
I've tested different ways to use agents to model stuff from images with accuracy. Maybe this is something that can help or give you ideas: https://janne-alatalo.fi/en/articles/silhouette-modeling/
If you have some physical reference, for example a coffee table, you can create an accurate 3D model of that quickly. The agent creates model that can be converted to STEP format and opened with any CAD software.
This might help you? You get a good model that you can start editing towards your own design.
Here is agent skill that works with OpenAI models and Codex https://github.com/janne-alatalo/image-to-cad-skill
Basically you take few pictures. Three is usually enough of furnitures. The agent uses the pictures to find the exact camera poses and creates a 3D model that minimizes the difference between the object's silhouette in images and in the 3D-model when projected with the virtual cameras to the 2D planes. The agents create the model with python scripts. First using numpy for faster optimization and finally CadQuery for easy exports to CAD formats.
- seemaze
A friend of mine was borrowing the shop of a very well known luthier to build some furniture. I stopped by to check the whole situation out and I found them both with their brows furrowed trying to work out some tolerances for a joint on a scrap piece of paper. As an architect by training, I quipped "at some point you'll have to start making proper drawings of you projects ahead of time", to which the luthier replied "the plans are always the problem, you're better off letting the wood tell you how it should be put it together." to which I had no reply..