| ▲ | lorenzohess 21 hours ago | |||||||
I can't really imagine that an LLM wrapper will be able to optimize designs well enough for this company to have many customers. Claude has helped me with brainstorming, but I do all the CAD and optimization. Would be cool if, in 10 years, the prompt to prototype pipeline was as simple, quick, and effective as this landing page alludes to. | ||||||||
| ▲ | hn_throwaway_99 21 hours ago | parent | next [-] | |||||||
I really question if this is going to be: 1. A frontier model wrapper that gens the designs 2. A bunch of humans behind the scenes ("AI means Another Indian") actually reviewing and fixing the design. That is, get to market quickly with people, gather lots of data, and hope that models can be refined eventually so less/no human review is needed. I recently worked with Claude Opus 5 High to help me build a testing rig for some acoustic tests. There was a lot of back and forth with each time Claude giving me the stereotypical "Great catch! I see my mistake in the previous iteration..." responses. | ||||||||
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| ▲ | zrobotics 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | |||||||
I mean, there's marketing copy on this page that makes me think the team doesn't really have any real manufacturing or design experience in the real world. >>"Make this enclosure lighter while keeping it strong. Optimized the geometry while maintaining structural requirements. 31% lighter Structure verified" Are we supposed to believe the AI just intuitively knows how strong is strong enough for the hypothetical enclosure? Engineering is about designing against actual constraints, and often those constraints are the actual hard part. For example, determining how strong an enclosure is is very easy, analysis tools in CAD/Cam software have had that for years and calculating yield is a 1st or 2nd year undergrad problem. The actual hard part is knowing how strong is strong enough. Rarely, if ever, are actual limits given in hard units. The engineer needs to determine how strong the enclosure needs to be to survive the intended use, and balance that with cost. But those design limits normally aren't given as "this needs to withstand this many kPa of point load", determining what that load is is often the hard part. There seems to be a lot of hand waving going on with this marketing copy and absolutely no details, only a 'book a demo' link. I'd also be very, very skeptical of how useful and modifiable the design files produced are. It's really easy to crap out a design in parametric CAD that is un-modifiable. Sketches can be done poorly or the model can be structured badly, so it becomes hard to edit later. I notice that their example files are all 3d meshes and not proper design files. If I'm making a physical product, having just a STL file doesn't help me much if I need to actually modify 'my' design. Am I to believe they can actually export a Solidworks file? I'm skeptical. While in theory it's a cool idea, this marketing copy amakes me think this is a vibe-coded project by a team with very little real-world experience. They are likely going to struggle landing any real customers, since their sales team won't be able to answer the questions a serious customer is going to ask. However, they will probably book some demos from people who have a idea of a product but no real road map. As someone who has done software consulting adjacent to this space (focusing on small manufacturers and design houses that would be their customers), the type of customers that will book a demo off of this page are also the type of customers you don't want to have. | ||||||||