I have a SolidWorks Students License™©® and it's the most frustrating piece of software I have ever used. Links to tutorials don't work. And when you do manage to get one, the tutorials are designed for older versions of solidworks and point to buttons that have been moved / don't exist where the tutorial tells you to look in the 2025 version.

The UI is the inverse of whatever intuitive is. It's built on convention after convention after convention. If you understand the shibboleths (and I'm guessing most people take a certified course by a trainer for it?), then it's great, but if you don't, it really sucks to be you (i.e. me).

I would LOVE to try out what you've built, but I am afraid that if the model misinterprets me or makes a mistake, it'll take me longer to debug / correct it than it would to just build it from scratch.

The kinds of things I want to make in solidworks are apparently hard to make in solidworks (arbitrarily / continuously + asymmetrically curved surfaces). I'm assuming that there won't be too many projects like this in the training dataset? How does the LLM handle something that's so out of pocket?

Welcome... To The Club!

And yea, you should find a course from a training firm rather than official documentation. It sucks and theres a reason Fusion360 seems to be really eating into the market after 5-10yrs.

Every time you put in a query, LAD takes a snapshot of the current model and stores it, so you can revert whatever changes the LLM makes if it messes up.

If it helps, I switched from SOLIDWORKS to Onshape many years ago and the latter has only improved since. The multi-user editing is first class and personally I find the user interface more intuitive (plus, web based = Linux support). I don't need the advanced simulation, analysis, etc. features that SW has over Onshape... yet.

Personally not familiar with curved models, but my understanding is that surface modelling with lofts guided by spline contours might be the way to go. Not sure if SW has those features.