GenCAD
dagenix
215 points
47 comments
May 17, 2026
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Discussion Highlights (16 comments)
knollimar
It says "can convert cad latents into a sequence of parametric CAD commands" Which CAD program? I'm confused Am I reading this right? >Most importantly, GenCAD does not merely generate a 3D solid but also the entire CAD program.
mamami
Ideally it would tie in with an llm, no? Like you would want to be able to say something like "create a design of car suspension subject to x,y,z contrains"
simpleintheory
Is this Google-affiliated? The heading font is Product/Google Sans which IIRC only Alphabet is allowed to use and the entire webpage seems to be Google-style but neither of the two named researchers seem to be employed by Google?
ironhaven
A another take on this problem is zoo.dev . They wrote a brand new from scratch cad engine that is driven a custom openscad style language called kcl. Then then have a trained llm that has can generate kcl to either create new parts or act as a llm assistant for changes to existing parts. It’s neat that llms can do 3-D but I wonder how much of the problem is integration.
cjtrowbridge
This has been easy with OpenSCAD for a long time. I have made lots of cool, complex models this way. I built a repo of the prompts I use to show the llm how to do this and it includes many of the models I've created this way... https://github.com/cjtrowbridge/vibe-modeling
ugh123
The examples they show are so basic.
ecto
Readers may also enjoy my open source Rust BRep CAD kernel https://github.com/ecto/vcad or the hosted version at https://vcad.io . I also wrote a bit about what goes into CAD apps! https://campedersen.com/tessellation
geuis
To the author if they happen to see this. Please kill the auto playing video. If someone is listening to something else on their phone this always takes over and interrupts.
achllle
I wanted to see how well it performed on real pictures of parts or hand-drawn drawings, but when I tried setting up the docker image, immediately ran into all kinds of dependencies not being installed. The examples make me suspect it doesn't work well beyond images that were generated from CAD in the first place.
Riany
the idea is good, but the examples still feel like a distance to handle real constraints and dimensions
nik282000
Website renders so poorly on my phone that I cant read half the text. Fits the bill for a slop project.
isaisabella
The demo seems pretty cool, but also pretty simple. When it comes to complicate models, I afriad it would be hard to generate the accurate 3D model.
clippy99
Maybe I missed something, if you have the image rendering in the first place, you already (likely) have the CAD. It is a nice demo, but what is the utility?
andrew_kwak
Checked out GenCAD. It seems pretty useful for simple circuit designs. Wondering if it supports import/export with other CAD formats?
jrflo
Neat, but I don't really see the utility. The time consuming part of CAD drawing comes from figuring out the correct dimensions of each feature, spacing, sizing, tolerances, etc., and constraining the drawing in a way so that it's easy to tweak later on- which this doesn't do at all. Maybe you could draw a 2d sketch of what you want then generate it, but you'd still have to do the hard part.
zkmon
How are the input images generated?