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dofm 4 hours ago

None of the "findings" here really needed an AI experiment to do it:

- "CadQuery fails loudly and early... OpenSCAD fails silently and late"

This should be obvious, from the documentation, from the way geometry construction works. OpenSCAD has no sense of failure where one shape means another won't work; you're just drawing the equivalent of 3D pixels in space. It will always potentially-meaninglessly succeed if the syntax is OK.

- Renders caught nothing that mattered

Objects with hollows are not going to show their major problems this way.

- CadQuery can be interrogated, OpenSCAD cannot

Isn't this explicit from the documentation of both? One works by iteratively building on top of a previous result that can be stored in a variable; the other doesn't.

- OpenSCAD renders have no concept of a part edge

Again — this should be explicit from the documentation, which describes no methods for operating on edges (and largely from the fact that it is declarative).

- Speed favours OpenSCAD, and it barely matters

Yes, being faster is no good if things are wrong.

- "What decides it is verifiability rather than expressiveness, and CadQuery leads there by a wider margin than the syntax difference suggests."

Yes, because the difference is semantic. Which you can get from the documentation. Building iteratively on the basis of existing geometry is inherently more verifiable, because stuff that can't work won't work.

Honestly do people not try learning CAD before they try to build an AI tool to generate CAD models? This feels like yet another situation where people who have not done the foundational conceptual work seem to think that they can avoid it and just work around it with AI.

ricardobeat 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Your mistake is assuming “people” wrote this.

dofm 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I mean, people didn't write the text, but people did decide it was what they wanted it to say?

I don't really get it. But then I think text-to-CAD is probably the strongest example of cart-before-horse thinking in the AI world as regards technical work compared to creative work.

fwip 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Who knows what the author wanted. "Write an well researched article comparing two approaches to 3d modeling with AI. Make no mistakes."

dofm 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The author is working on a text-to-CAD app. I would hope they were a bit further along with understanding CAD in order to make AI automate it?

(Am I naïve? … Oh god, I'm naïve)

knollimar 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'm trying to teach a subordinate to draft and he keeps saying "this feels automatable" before he undedstands how to do it. I had to explicitly tell him "do not try to automate [particular task] before you know how to do it. He has not successfully finished said task once, and I caught him working on it on Friday...

fwip 31 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

You could totally be right - but for me, the problem of AI writing is that it's really hard to know how much work the original author put into it, or their level of understanding.