
Shipped: a Mac app that designs printable mechanisms from one sentence. What I learned building it
Today I launched CAD Studio (https://filippofinke.github.io/cad-studio/), a free, open-source Mac app: describe a part, and a coding agent writes real parametric CAD for it, with drawings, a print plate and a simulation.
Some lessons from building it:
- Let the AI check its own output. The biggest quality jump came from having the agent look at the drawings it generated and fix them.
- Show progress. Hard mechanisms make the agent think for minutes; streaming every step keeps people from thinking it froze.
- Keep it local and editable. Projects are plain folders with the generated code, so nothing is locked in.
- Versions everywhere. Every answer is a version you can compare in 3D, which makes iterating safe.
Source: https://github.com/filippofinke/cad-studio
Next: notarizing the app and printing more examples. Feedback welcome.