I don't think so. As a mechanical engineer, CAD is only half of the design process. The other half is actually building and assembling your design and testing/debugging what you've created. You still need the mechanical knowledge and intuition to take something in the physical world, figure out why it doesn't work, and apply that to the CAD design to improve it. It would be incredible to have AI help me model faster, but there's no validation loop like there is with software, so you can't have an agent run wild and endlessly iterate.

▲ altcognito 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> CAD is only half of the design process

I'm not a mechanical engineer but I would be surprised if it was even 30% of the process. Materials, manufacturability, durability, fitting into other requirements. Some of those things can be part of the CAD design, but there's so much more.

Not to say that CAD isn't a big chunk!

	▲	jrflo 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Agreed, it's probably 10% of the total product development process, but approximately half if you're just considering "design" tasks.

▲ cpcabbge 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> As a mechanical engineer, CAD is only half of the design process.

Same thing can be said about animation and games.

▲ ur-whale 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

None of the things you list in the "other half" are out of reach for AI.

Also: disagree about the lack of validation loop:

   a) AI can actually build one for you in many cases

   b) if you give agents an actual validation toolkit, you'll be surprised what AI can do

Of course, if you expect to prompt "give me a NURBS model of a complete, working v8 motor" and get a result, then yeah, sure, we're not there yet.

I've actually built a bunch of stuff with a combo of astra, blender, openscad and tiny bits of AI written helpers ... giving the AI the proper "hands" to work with the models is key.

One particularly useful tool to provide the AI with is to be able to "look" at the model as it iterates on it (measure dimensions, shoot arbitrary rays at it that return exact intersections and normals, see if the object obeys engineering constraints, etc ...).

Works pretty well for many, many things and saves a TON of time.

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jrflo 7 hours ago | parent [-]

AI cannot physically build anything in the real world, what are you referring to? That's a huge part of mechanical engineering.

And you can give it simulation tools, but those are far far away from accounting for everything in real-world physics. You can simulate very tightly constrained problems, but you can't simulate "assemble this actuator and test it", there are so many more variables in the real world that are not easy to account for in a simulation.

If you aren't an engineer that works on physical products, it's hard to articulate just how far from reality CAD and simulations are.

	▲	matchstickman23 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This is how LLMs have been since the beginning. They can be really okay at the most surface level information, but as soon as you dig any bit beyond that, it all falls apart. Inquire any chatbot about something that you're an expert in and it becomes quickly apparent. I'm here for using LLMs to take some of the tedium out of product design/mechanical engineering, but I just haven't seen a good proof of concept yet. It always seems to be some variation of "Design a sphere. Oh wow, this is incredible!"