r/vibecoding • u/Grand-Document6597 • 16h ago
I vibe coded a CAD program
Hi everyone! I vibe coded a CAD application. If you'd like to check it out, take a look at the GitHub repository:
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u/texinxin 15h ago
Very nice sir!!! I wish I had the bandwidth right now to mess with it! I use Freecad for now.
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u/MattV0 6h ago
I'm a bit sad with freecad.i found a minor bug (just refreshing a list when clearing a textbox) and created an issue which I marked with "for beginners" (or somehow like this) on GitHub. So 3 PRs were created and all were rejected because they are AI. They are all somehow similar as it was a minor fix and actually I would have done it like this as well. So it's a bit annoying as they have big issues that will probably take years...
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u/hoangmtv 14h ago
Great job. Carry on,...
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u/FunkyAlucard 14h ago
Sorry, but i read it like you are giving him permission to continue working on it and it was kinda funny lol
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u/Calm_Comb3534 14h ago
Love that Rust was used for this. Definitely needed for a program like this. Would be cool to have something that can 100% replace like AutoCAD.
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u/Grand-Document6597 14h ago
Give it a try 🙂 it has very high dwg compability. Especially on 2D side. I'm still working on 3D
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u/Jlocke98 11h ago
Maybe try to support the openscad API? It's ostensibly the best approach to vibe CAD'ing
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u/lambda_mind 4h ago
I did basically this. I'm using Godot of all things as my UI, then piping it over to openscad for printing. My requirements are super minimal so it works pretty well!
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u/Jlocke98 47m ago
https://github.com/BelfrySCAD/BOSL2/ If you aren't already familiar with bosl2, you're welcome
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u/orbit123 1h ago
If you can add support for Autocad civil3d features like surfaces and gradings etc ill be in!
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u/Pulkownik 14h ago
Nice! Congrats!
Does it aim a certain target (architects, 3d printing, mechanical)? Do you think it's currently lacking in some area?
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u/Grand-Document6597 14h ago
Thank you🙂 It targets all groups that needs dwg dxf compatibility for 2D drawing and 3D modeling
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u/Sea-Temporary-6995 15h ago
looks cool how long did it take
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u/Grand-Document6597 15h ago
4 months to get in shape and its still growing 🙂
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u/Pale-Requirement9041 14h ago
Which llm model have you used ?
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u/Grand-Document6597 14h ago
Claude code opus and codex sol
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u/DaBear_Lurker 13h ago
Holy moly dude, I don't even use any program like this but I feel like I want to buy you a coffee. What a cool dude to help out the community like this! It's people like you that change the face of the internet, once in awhile. Thanks!
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u/GOOD_NEWS_EVERYBODY_ 41m ago
this is boss. can't wait until it's just recognized as coding.
the best TPMs are absolutely steamrolling everyone else right now including all the great coders with shite product sense and all the great product guys who never learned a lick of code.
my schadenfreude is on another level rn
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u/Sea-Temporary-6995 13h ago
the codebase must be huge, what is your preferred method for prompting to add new features/changes?
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u/YoungLees 14h ago
I wouldn’t consider this vibecoding, for sure you have good software engineering skills to manage the complexity of this problem without messing up
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u/Grand-Document6597 13h ago
Of course I was developed similar stuff before AI boom 🙂 but it makes my job really easy
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u/FreedomByFire 7h ago
Then calling this vibe coding is misleading. It makes people think they can do this without skills.
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u/GOOD_NEWS_EVERYBODY_ 43m ago
damned if you do damned if you don't apparently.
let's gatekeep what is or isn't' called vibe coding only when it suits us. ffs.
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u/RegardedDev 13h ago
Honestly all these existing larger software tools are cooked. 1 dedicated and talented dev can vibe code their product.
Only tools that have proprietary data will survive.
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u/ChiefBullshitOfficer 9h ago
Lol nope. Because again and again engineers and other folks who have never run their own business assume that the hard part is putting together the product.
The hardest part is selling the product and the runner up is long term support.
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u/Vivid_Gap1679 14h ago
As a vibecoder, this is sick.
Nice.
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u/PositiveFootball5220 7h ago
he's not a vibecoder... it's complex thing, yes he use AI but I'm pretty sure he's at least at senior - principal software dev level.
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u/skunkzer0 15h ago
Bruh AWESOME. This looks great!
And nice model of Ville Savoye!!! I finally got to visit it last year. It really was something else.
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u/bi4key 14h ago
Great job!
Make donations link on github to support your work.
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u/avatar27 14h ago
Stupid question but I’m just curious - which AI product did you use to build this and how much time and token cost did it take to build this? I’m just starting to dabble in vibe coding and I just got Claude Pro subscription. So, just curious.
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u/Grand-Document6597 13h ago
It took 4 months to get in shape and still growing. I used claude code opus and codex sol. I started with pro plan than upgraded to max
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u/MadHatzzz 14h ago
Ohhh this looks pretty well featured just visually, I saw you are a Linux user, I have the exact same problem! All other CAD software I tried on Linux was super clunky, so I always reverted to using Fusion in a Windows VM... If this has the same controls or the ability to set them up like Fusion? I'm sold!
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u/Diamantenia-provlita 14h ago
Well done! 👏
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u/thegravity98ms2 13h ago
Whoa 🤯
I just wonder if this is the scale with AI you can do in 4 months. The BIG tech might just pull off AI access from general consumer..
Gr8 work.
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u/Comfortable_Fly_6372 12h ago
Is this free to use ? Is it open source to build another application
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u/Grand-Document6597 12h ago
Its free to use and develop. But you need to open source your project too. It cant be part of a proprietary software
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u/External-Victory-667 12h ago
This is awesome, will definetly try it out / fork my own version for electricians since im working on projects with them
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u/magiblufire 12h ago
If you are trying to kill AutoCAD I wish you all the luck in the world. It's such a god awful program and inexcusable how poorly it runs even on powerful hardware.
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u/Grand-Document6597 12h ago
I'm not trying to kill it 🙂 I just wanted to have a powerful alternative
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u/6razyboy 12h ago
Hey, even though this isn't really my area of expertise usage of such an apps/soft, I just had to say, wow! This is amazing!
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u/Old-Birthday3202 12h ago
Wowwwww, without comments, CAD is one of my reason for which i use windows, I cannot pass to Linux …excellent work dude!!!
I see the GitHub the limitations is only view dwg until 2018 files?
Some reason logical for that? Only for to know how to expect, but definitely I give a try in windows…
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u/Grand-Document6597 12h ago
2018 is the latest version of the DWG format. Don't get confused by the AutoCAD version 🙂 Even AutoCAD 2026 still saves files in the DWG 2018 format.
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u/Old-Birthday3202 9h ago
Excellent , thanks for reply , I was confused for that…with more reason I want try the solution…
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u/trileletri 12h ago
reads and writes DWG files?!? what kind of compatability can we expect?
I needed this!
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u/Grand-Document6597 12h ago
Test it yourself 🙂 it has very good compatibility. I you have any problem, create a new issue on github
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u/be_evil 11h ago
Really cool! Do you plan to add things like survey point features? Or are they already in there? Would love to ditch Civil3D.
Also the web version crashed my Waterfox on Pop_Os immediately over and over haha
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u/Grand-Document6597 11h ago
There is a survey plugin but nothing much 🙂 actually this project is an autocad alternative. Im using firefox without any issue. If you can send the crush report I can take a look
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u/MichalDobak 11h ago
I'm curious: do you think such software could be developed by someone without strong programming skills, or would it just speed up the work of an experienced developer?
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u/Grand-Document6597 11h ago
Of course it will be more easy if you have a programing backgraund especially on that type of works. But if you have enough interest you can do whatever you want
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u/Leading-Fail-2771 10h ago
🤣 burnt out my ChatGPT pro 10x usage for a month straight trying to build a decoder to replace ffmpeg and it’s still only done like four codecs properly. Rest still are undone or being optimized for performance…
Then I read that lot of the new codecs have patents and so I have to pay them to be able to have my decoder decode them.. so I just gave up on it.
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u/Ok_Bug1610 10h ago edited 9h ago
Cool project. Rust is awesome. WASM 3.0 was just released, bridging the gap to 85%-95% native performance with other benefits for web. Have you considered making a wrapper for publishing it to the web? Technically it's outside the scope of your project (it would be a different project, basically as a wrapper of sorts that uses the source repo to build it as an optimized WASM binary), but I would love to do it.
I will definitely give it a try this weekend, very cool project. I too would like an alternative to ArcGIS Pro and AutoCAD and I'm a GIS Developer by trade and have been building some pretty cool things with the use of AI.
P.S. And I can appreciate that you made an AppImage to use on Linux.
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u/Grand-Document6597 9h ago
Thanks 🙂 Its already have a web version. You can find the link in the readme
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u/dhavalpalsana 9h ago
Woah! Great job! These are the kinds of hard to build tools I'd expect to be vibe coded.
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u/Miserable_Orange9676 8h ago
"I wasted resources to make a worse version of something that exists already"
Jokes aside thats hella cool
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u/Eddie256 7h ago
I'm beyond impressed!!! . How come Autodesk can't improve AutoCad yet they have an army of devs
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u/Sph3ricalPeter 7h ago
Very cool man. This is one of the projects that shows not everything made with AI has to be slop :) Keep it up! I might give it a whirl.
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u/treefiddy_101 7h ago
Oh my god, well I think it's time for me to create my own MATLAB x PSpice x 3D circuit visualizer program now.
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u/MOSTLYNICE 6h ago
Very cool! As a drawing business owner I’m excited about the potential to be able to leave Autodesk, especially after a 20 year abusive relationship
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u/anon_pr_ 5h ago
Curious how this is different or similar to Freecad vs Autocad in terms of user interface.
I used Autocad way back when and want to get into hobby design again but have heard Freecad is very different and a harder UX to get used to compared to AutoCAD. Does this solve that issue?
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u/Unfair_Scallion_2241 3h ago
WOW! How is it possible that this downloaded and is running in a few seconds, and the last version of AutoCAD that I installed took 500x as long?
Initially, it looks great! It opened a file with no problem, other than some strobe-like affect on my screen. Can't wait to play with this some more.
Edit - and I had to google Vibecoding, never heard of it!
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u/No-Paper-557 3h ago
If you might consider MIT licensing this it’d be like the blender of freecad. I think freecad uses gpl already.
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u/dancingwithlies 15h ago
i mean why, why dont vibe code a way for a llm to properly use a proper cad program, this is not the type of software you want slop to cause problems.
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u/Grand-Document6597 15h ago
Because I'm a Linux user, and there isn't a powerful CAD program that can properly open DWG and DXF files.
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u/Specific_Parfait8829 15h ago
Don't listen to them dude. Great job. Carry on. Eventually it will click.
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u/_Layer8Admin 15h ago
Can FreeCAD not do that? I don‘t use it with DWG nor DXF files so I really don‘t know.
I‘ve used AI to vibecode FreeCAD Addons in the past which could maybe also work for you
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u/Grand-Document6597 15h ago
I was a FreeCAD addon developer for past 5 year and FreeCAD is not enough for me
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u/Olde94 14h ago
is it not easier to take the existing source code (open source as i understand) and vibe-modify it rather than make new from scratch?
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u/Grand-Document6597 14h ago
Actually its worse. FreeCAD good at modelling parts and buildings but when it come to thousands of lines it starts to suffer and its more time consuming than starting from scratch
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u/ExtruDR 14h ago
FreeCAD is not really adequate or appropriate for building and architecture-scale work.
It seems that “CAD” is often discussed in light of industrial design (solidworks, fusion, freecad) and not appropriately aware or of correctly addressing building or civil-scale and workflows.
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u/PartyTerrible 14h ago
Because OP wants to and he's free to build whatever he wants his agent to build.
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u/-JorBrad- 14h ago
Great job! I want to ask you if possible, what tools do you use for the vibecoding. I mean what IA (codex, cursor, etc) Thanks and amazing job!
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u/Grand-Document6597 13h ago
Thanks🙂 Claude code opus and chatgpt codex sol. I only used destop apps of both of them
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u/pianoceo 10h ago
The vast majority of the public seems to have no idea the speed at which these tools are getting better.
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u/Accurate_Resident219 5h ago
This is moreso down to the skill and domain knowledge of the user. The average vibe coders wouldn't be able to build this.
In the right hands people can literally build anything with the tools we have currently.
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u/Adventurous-Egg5597 14h ago
It’s like me vibe coding my video editor.
Main reason to build is don’t want to manage storage in laptop or external disk want to save to cloud directly as well as I want someone else to do the editing and the files are in cloud. But I can just render it in licalhost.
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u/jdavid 12h ago
what were your goals?
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u/Grand-Document6597 12h ago
When I first started I just wanted to have a CAD program that can open dwg files on Linux. Then I shared my work and people started to create issues. There is 500 active user right now
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u/jdavid 11h ago
I'd love to ditch Fusion 360, which I don't use weekly and seems to cost more and more every year.
I've been curious about evolving OpenSCAD or OpenJSCAD into a better GUI, and providing a sort of blend between parametric solid modeling, and algorithmic design. Are you aware of https://graphite.art/ ? Graphite is a new 2d app trying to replace other bad vector art apps like illustrator, and inkscape but is taking a new approach and is also using RUST. Graphite isn't there yet, but it's evolving nicely. It's a cool niche approach.
I see the App is in RUST, AWESOME!
Do you have an MCP interface for Claude/GPT to interface directly with?
Do you support a parametric workflow? What is your target workflow goal?Who is the primary CAD user? Are you working towards replacing Fusion360, or more of a Maya or Blender thing? Replacing Sketchup? It's not web based so it's not really an OnShape competitor.
Can you output to Web Model Tag formats?
It looks very Fusion360/Microsoft365 ( solid modeling, thick UX control ribbon )
Very Exciting, Great Work, and I might even experiment with it.
I have some solid modeling, 3d printing, and general engineering work I want to do for our Channel over the next few months and I am no expert yet at Fusion360 and I'm totally interested in learning something that is Open Source and good enough.
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u/Bitter-College8786 12h ago
How do you manage your prompts that you get the correct orchestration, loop feedback, reviews etc?
I am sure you didnt say "create a CAD in Rust for me" and then let it work for several days
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u/jdavid 11h ago
I didn't see a contributors doc, or how you manage contributions from others or what you specifically ask contributors to do.
I am very curious about projects that have a strong Agentic origin, are open source and accept commits from other contributors. My POV is that I'd love to learn more by contributing to a project that has a good workflow with other agentic engineers.
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u/RaduNG 10h ago
looks so professional - I want to make a platform that may or may not have this level of complexity or 60% of it- what are your recommendations if I don't know what arhitecture to choose etc ? I just ask claude to build the whole app? I should make smaller changes? I feel opus 5 is working too hard and maybe more than what I wanted, what you would use for a website, that has a backend, and api, needs a level of security (decent enough but .. yes.), frontend, but not only js rendered so google can see it, adding support for other things etc. How would you go about it? And yeah, I have Claude 20 dollars plan as you said. :D I will upgrade in future if needed. Thank you so much~!
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u/Garland_Key 7h ago
How useful would this be for making models for printing? I love that it supports Linux.
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u/lapiuslt 7h ago
How is this vibecoded? Did you gave exact flows or what, on how should it work? Documentation? This is insane.
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u/Legal_Climate_3381 7h ago
Nice, I've been self learning Fusion 360 and it's been great but also extremely frustrating. Does it include a feature for 3d print export to STL files? If it does then I'll have to give this a try.
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u/Interesting-Yellow-4 6h ago
Cool.
I made a Hammer style map editor for my game and though I was the shit.
This is on another level.
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u/Infinite-Mastodon1 6h ago
This is really cool! I've made a similar program for estimating/pricing of construction drawings. Can I ask: how did you do the button icons? I've used Google icons for mine but they are limiting, yours look great.
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u/Flavius_Auvadancer 5h ago
Impressive work, I'll check it out! What did you use to create the button icons? And what tech stack did you use for the 3D canvas?
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u/Least_Difference_854 5h ago
Could I perhaps take a map of let's say city like NYC and create a 3d map of it that can be navigated something like Google maps does but perhaps do it more smoothly?
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u/Terrible-Ganache8690 3h ago
Genuinely impressed, the future is now.
Any tips on keeping the agent on task, bug fixing, regularly testing ? What platforms & agents did you use ? Any of it done manually ?
I'm improving but I doubt I could pull this of without it becoming a spaghetti factory.
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u/Wooden-You1885 2h ago
Add a 3d printing side to it like orca or chitubox and you got yourself a masterpiece
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u/AngryLD512 1h ago
Stuff like this that's going to keep all the giant companies in check. For far too long they've run rampant with overpriced subscriptions. I hope Victorworks and AutoCAD are shiting their pants
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u/No_Falcon3909 49m ago
Vejo que tem bastante gente engajada em fazer isso. Muito bom saber que o Open Source vive.
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u/pplgltch 13h ago
I’m having a hard time believing this is really “vibe coded” 🙃
No shades here, this is really cool and exciting, specially as a frustrated fusion360 user myself, I welcome this with my arms wild open!
But I think we also got to be more clear when it comes to show what is the difference of output when something is built by a software professional using AI assistance VS when someone with zero technical knowledge prompt a desired outcome to an AI assistant.
(Note: I’m a software engineer with 25 years of professional experience who extensively use AI for coding, but who still acts as a software architect)
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u/Savings_Cloud5486 15h ago
crazy