I have complex feelings about it all too. My hope is we'll re-consider what's considered hard. As a designer who started his career after the advent of digital typesetting, some of the things I barely think about were once considered difficult.
IIRC the CAD exports were in the many millions of polygons, so there's substantial work in preparing the assets for the explorer. Kenan (the 3d artist I worked with) did fantastic work cleaning and optimising them. I'm somewhat jealous of hardware startups with products without quite so many parts!
It's part of the reason I'd waited so long before making this, I knew it was going to be a lot of work. There's parts that Claude was especially useful for, like perf testing, debugging and animation. But the first half of the project was done almost entirely by hand.
I think there's a few Rust ones knocking around, some LLM-assisted. I've recently had Claude re-implement the inline parser (https://github.com/oxidecomputer/react-asciidoc) using our large corpus (600+) of AsciiDoc documents
Had it convert it in this and the stock version, compare the output, fix and repeat.
You may be happy (or unhappy) to know that was definitely considered – it felt a little more trouble than it was worth, and dare I say a little too on the nose?
I design them in Monodraw, pass it through a janky converter I wrote that converts text into a json grid of characters. I then render a number of layers that get combined, which is a mix of the static art layer, and others generated from functions that spit out a similar cell based frame.
I have complex feelings about it all too. My hope is we'll re-consider what's considered hard. As a designer who started his career after the advent of digital typesetting, some of the things I barely think about were once considered difficult.