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Hi HN, I'm Zach, one of the co-founders of Adam (https://adam.new).We've been on HN twice before with text-to-CAD/3D experiments [1][2]. The honest takeaway from those threads: prompt-to-3D model web apps are fun, but serious mechanical engineers don't want a black box that spits out an STL. They want help inside the CAD tool they already use, with full visibility and control over the feature tree.So we built that. Adam is now a harness that integrates directly with your CAD. It reads your parts, understands the existing feature tree, and edits it for you agentically. We are now live in beta on Onshape and Fusion! [3]:Install link Autodesk Fusion: https://fusion.adam.new/installInstall link PTC Onshape:
https://cad.onshape.com/appstore/apps/Design%20&%20Documenta...Things people are using it for today: - "Merge redundant features and clean up my tree" - "Rename every feature so the tree is actually readable" - "Round all internal edges with a 2mm fillet" - “Parametrize my model” - Along with of course, using Adam to generate CAD end-to-end!A few things we care about that aren't obvious from the listing:1. From the start we have always believed in CAD as code as the right abstraction. Our harness leverages Onshape's FeatureScript and Python in Fusion heavily.2. We run an internal CAD benchmark across frontier models. There has been a massive jump in the spatial reasoning capabilities of recent models, particularly GPT 5.5 and Opus 4.7 [4] [5]3. We open-sourced our earlier text-to-CAD work [6]A note on the Anthropic Autodesk connector that shipped a couple days ago [7]: We think it's great for the space and validates the direction.Where Adam is different: - Model-agnostic. We pick whichever frontier model is winning on each task type from our own internal bench, instead of being tied to one lab. - We live natively in your CAD apps and are actively building integrations across all programsWhat would you want an in-CAD agent to do that nothing does today?[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44182206[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45140921[3] https://x.com/adamdotnew/status/2050264512230719980?s=20[4] https://x.com/adamdotnew/status/2044859329329893376?s=20[5] https://x.com/adamdotnew/status/2047795078912172122?s=20[6] https://github.com/Adam-CAD/CADAM[7] https://x.com/claudeai/status/2049143440508616863?s=20
Show HN: AI CAD Harness
An in-CAD AI agent that provides granular control and visibility over the feature tree, contrasting with "black box" text-to-3D model solutions. It is model-agnostic and leverages "CAD as code" principles.
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AI Executive Synthesis
An in-CAD AI agent that provides granular control and visibility over the feature tree, contrasting with "black box" text-to-3D model solutions. It is model-agnostic and leverages "CAD as code" principles.
Mechanical engineers require precise control and transparency in CAD workflows, rendering "black box" generative AI solutions impractical. Adam's AI CAD Harness directly addresses this by integrating agentic capabilities *within* existing CAD environments, allowing engineers to maintain full visibility and control over the feature tree. This approach solves critical pain points like manual feature cleanup, inconsistent naming conventions, and complex parametrization. By leveraging "CAD as code" principles and being model-agnostic, Adam offers a flexible, powerful tool for enhancing design efficiency and consistency. This represents a significant trend in enterprise software: embedding AI directly into professional tools to augment, rather than replace, expert users, driving productivity and reducing repetitive tasks in complex design processes.
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What is AI CAD Harness?
AI CAD Harness is analyzed by our AI as: An in-CAD AI agent that provides granular control and visibility over the feature tree, contrasting with "black box" text-to-3D model solutions. It is model-agnostic and leverages "CAD as code" principles.. It focuses on Mechanical engineers require precise control and transparency in CAD workflows, rendering "black box" generative AI solutions impractical. Adam's A...
Where did AI CAD Harness originate?
Data for AI CAD Harness was aggregated directly from the Hacker News community ecosystem, representing raw developer and early-adopter sentiment.
When was AI CAD Harness publicly launched?
The initial public indexing or launch date for AI CAD Harness within our tracked developer communities was recorded on May 2, 2026.
How popular is AI CAD Harness?
AI CAD Harness has achieved measurable traction, logging over 71 traction score and facilitating 71 recorded discussions or engagements.
Which technical categories define AI CAD Harness?
Based on metadata extraction, AI CAD Harness is categorized under topics such as: AI CAD Harness, integrates directly with CAD, reads parts, understands feature tree.
What are some commercial alternatives to AI CAD Harness?
Our semantic intelligence engine identifies potential commercial alternatives in the SaaS space, such as Ferrari Luce, which offers overlapping value propositions.
How does the creator describe AI CAD Harness?
The original author or development team describes the product as follows: "Hi HN, I'm Zach, one of the co-founders of Adam (https://adam.new).We've been on HN twice before with text-to-CAD/3D experiments [1][2]. The honest takeaway from those threads: prompt-to-3D model w..."
Community Voice & Feedback
Obligatory mention of https://zoo.dev/ the leader in this space.I will say I explored this reasonably deeply and came away with the conclusion that even though we have OpenSCAD and all these examples, LLMs are still very weak at spatial reasoning compared to diffusion models.You can do all sorts of tricks like have a parts library to get around this and do physics checks but another inconvenient truth is whenever you design a complex assembly, every change to that part needs to be aware of the other parts in the design -- thus you need a global part-aware editing capability from diffusion.That's getting solved already in china leading labs, and bottlenecked by the lack of good training data, which china is solving with mass labor.This will be solved overseas first before we will in the US.
I built https://is.gd/X1KScw for this exact gap — an AI specifically trained on off-grid and survival knowledge rather than a general LLM. Curious what this community thinks.
Mechanical engineer here. The idea of having to sift through every intricate detail this thing spits out, just to guard against one hallucinated miscalculation making its way into the real world, is enough to keep me up at night. This AI shit is getting ridiculous.
Mechanical Engineer here, stop using AI to deal with the most enjoyable part of design PLEASEAn automated drafting too where I can describe design intent and requirements would be a million times better, especially if it is CAD context aware.I would say around 5-20% of mENG is not actually modelling, the endless pursuit of text to cad and other ai works is both not helpful and not enjoyable(PS: The feature tree renaming does look very useful)
Been following you guys a while, seems like you've been gaining some traction recently, lets goo and congrats!I have been working on GrandpaCAD[0] for a while, a very similar product. I thought of you as my biggest competitors but noticed recently you are focusing more and more on professionals while I am focusing on total noobs in modeling who just want to whip out a quick model. So I guess we are not competitors anymore?My evals[1] show that Opus 4.7 and GPT 5.5 are very comparable in terms of generation quality, but GPT 5.5 is slower and costs sooo much more in my harness. And the original breakthrough model was Gemini 3.1. I'm curious do you have more written about your benchmarks setup?If you want to chat email is in my profile. Btw, just met "your"(?) neighbour on a plane a couple of days ago. World is small.[0]: https://grandpacad.com[1]: https://grandpacad.com/en/blog/public-benchmarks-misled-me-o...
Is the internal data model of fusion structured enough to be understood with a text-based LLM? Or do you need to basically screenshot the render to understand what is happening?Would a more CAD-as-code based approach to CAD design be more suitable?Just like, LLMs have an easier time to build a presentation with latex than with powerpoint...
As someone with a background in mechanical engineering, I'd love to be able to automate CAD design as it's quite tedious and only fun like 5% of the time, but I've tried these tools and I really don't think text-to-CAD is the right approach. It usually takes longer for me to come up with an accurate written prompt to fully dimension what I need than to just grab my space mouse and do it.
I'd love something like this for FreeCAD.
This looks interesting and promising! But I'm confused about your business model and pricing, which mentions "creative generations"? I'd like to understand it better before investing time into this.
From the OnShape demo videos in the tweets, it looks like sketches are unconstrained. Can this create constraints or other parametric relationships between entities?And does this use your OnShape API quota? If it's making a new API call for each individual feature, I could see this blowing through the annual quota very quickly. What does this look like in practice?
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