That's true but some years ago that I tried to develop a very similar product/project I went mostly on the same path. as another comment states, UI is a great place NOT to re-invent the wheel
Also changing CAD programs is already hard enough and having very similar UI/UX is a feature, not a by-product of agentic coding.
Also in many cases I honestly can't think of a better way to do stuff
That is exactly my take, though I'm ramping down the agents for the time being - 90% of the functionality is there and it's time to pay back the engineering time that I borrowed :P
I have a lot of experience developing CAD (before the AI boom) and while it made 0 sense to burn 1-2 years of my life to produce a similar MVP, now that I HAVE this MVP, it makes a ton of sense to pour my time on it
Also I'm gonna tackle some more god-problems with agents, like reversing the sldprt/f3d filetypes to allow importing them without losing history and more - each of this would require years of engineering hours and even achieving the 80% that agentic coding does is something that has never been done before
I heavily used LLM agents and it took about a month - of course I'm already starting to pay back the gained time
The development as I see it for such a project is about a year so I expect to take roughly 6 months to iron out the weird slop here and there
Having said that, the project right now is at an astonishing point and, in fear of jinxing myself, it works. Yea there are the occasional UI bugs here and there (incorrect tool grouping, incorrect tool icons, etc.) but welp, it does what I mostly want it to
Side note: I've done a similar project before and have tons of experience around building similar products, this is not an "AI success/AI will take your job" story - far from it
the target audience (which I'm a part off too) is hobbyist and small shops. Competing with the big giants I think is impossible (SolidWorks/Fusion/onShape/etc.) but I think that the vast majority of people use only a very small subset of features
Interoperability is of paramount importance and it's probably going to be the best deep dive
that was the idea and this is such a huge project that I kept as much variables static as possible. I want the app to feel close to what people already know - and that applies to me as a user too (I want to use the app too after all!)
This is the pre-alpha/alpha release of a new CAD that I created. It uses OpenCascade 7.9 under the hood via WASM and a custom sketch solver written in typescript (substantially faster than I thought it would be)
Right now it can do most of the CAD stuff that one expects apart from anything that involves meshes or curved face manipulation - that'll come soon but I want to have a stable base first before I move any further
I hope you like it, I'm eager to hear your thoughts!
https://www.blacksmith.sh/ and https://runs-on.com/
They also say that they're much cheaper than github