u/tylerdoubleyou

What makes CAD difficult sometimes is that there are 500 ways to do any one thing, and everybody thinks their way is the best. I find among people I talk to there's a surprisingly wide spread in how people use the built-in C3D features to manage points and linework. Wondering if there's any overall consensus.

For importing and managing points, do you:

1. Use the survey database 100%
2. Use the survey database, but then import points to the drawing as COGO points
3. Never use the database, import everything as COGO points and keep it that way

Do you keep points stored outside of the DWG?

1. Once I import to a DWG, that's where they live forever
2. They live in survey database
3. They live in the dwg, but I keep a separate CSV or TXT file alongside for backup
4. Something else?

For linework, do you:

1. Draw linework automatically from field codes as survey figures, then keep them as survey figures through production?
2. Draw linework automatically from field codes as survey figures, but then convert figures to 3D or 2D polys and draft from there?
3. Draw linework either by hand or some other way as 2D/3D polys and never touch survey figures?
4. What's a survey figure?

Bonus Question:

For boundaries, do you use parcels for every boundary line? Some of the time? None of the time?

Just an amusing anecdote from a user only about 10 days in to my AI awakening. If not allowed, delete me.

I asked Claude to design an integration between my business's time tracking app and billing platform. It was confident what I wanted to do was very doable. It found the appropriate API's, guided me through the setup, and then started testing. Then, in the most urgent and concerned tone I've ever heard Claude express, it warned me that something had gone wrong and that a test invoice may have inadvertently been sent to a client. (It had not, only appeared that way on the platform, I know not to anthropomorphize, but when I told Claude I swear it was relieved.)

The urgent issue settled, Claude began to troubleshoot. After some deliberation Claude states, your billing platform's API is bugged. It does not behave as the documentation states. I don't see a workaround. It writes a letter and suggest I send to the platforms technical support.

This letter was 3 paragraphs of technobabble, nonsense to me. I sent it. Well, unsurprisingly, Level 1 technical support is an AI Chatbot. I paste it's response to Claude, then Claude back to it... I have absolutely no idea what they are talking about. After a few exchanges of not getting anywhere, I escalate to a human.

Human reviews the chat, an hour later confirms Claude is right, that function is bugged. Promises a fix. Next morning, fix is tested and deployed, they thanked me for bringing it to their attention. Claude confirms all is good, the build accomplished all I hoped.

Claude found the bug, chatted with a developer's AI chatbot about it, a human almost certainly used AI to summarize that exchange, then confirm, write and test a bug fix. 12 hours start to finish.

I'm happy to have my integration and for maybe helping to fix a bug for other users. My only contribution? "Claude, I want this thing."

I'm on C3D and am using Claude, but seems like any of the major AI's will work. Some of the more complicated ones take a few iterations, but so far nearly everything I've wanted has been successful. Even though some of these are pretty basic, it'd be hard to imagine life without them, and I know I'm just barely scratching the surface.

Some of the routines I have:

Set Next Point - Prompts me for a point number, if that number is in use it goes to the next available number, then starts the create manual points routine. We use different point ranges for certain things, and it was maddening to have to check the point list to see what the next number in that range is, then set it in the Point Identity tab.

Area by Interior Point - Area by interior point. Click inside any closed line work and create an Mtext with the acreage and square footage (my template's text styles and layers hard coded in). Much faster than wrangling parcels or the AREA command when doing something quick.

Variable Offset - Select a close polygon, highlights each segment and prompts for an offset, when finished it fillets them together and puts it a preassigned layer. I use this on lots with varying front/side/rear setbacks. (This one's not perfect, won't work on curves)

BGmask - Add a background mask to the selected text (fill color and gap spacing hard coded).

I've got a handful of others for minor tasks, but setup such that styles and labels specific to my template are baked in. A few others for things that AutoCAD can do natively, but instead of a 10 clicks its done in one command. For example 3DPolyFlatten, which converts all selected 3DPolylines to 2DPolys and sets elevation to 0.

Give it a try.