CAD and machining are different fields, true, but I see a lot of the same flaws that Adam Karvonen highlighted in his essay on LLM-aided machining a few months ago:

https://adamkarvonen.github.io/machine_learning/2025/04/13/l...

Do any people with familiarity on what's under the hood know if the latent space produced by most transformer paradigms is only capable of natively simulating 1-d reasoning and has to kludge together any process for figuring geometry with more degrees of freedom?

Well, they couldn't generate 2D artwork if they weren't capable of working with multiple output dimensions.

An interesting thing about transformers is that they are world-class at compressing 2D image data even when not trained on anything but textual language ( https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.10668 ). Whether that notion is relevant for 3D content would be two or three figures over my pay grade, though.