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AI CAD Harness

Details

External ID
47977694
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
AI CAD Harness
Website domain
adam.new
Launched
May 1, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
101
Upvotes percentile
0.9095315024232633
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Updated at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.

Description

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

Enrichment

Theme
3D modeling and visual design tools
Vertical
Manufacturing
Function
Agent / copilot
Audience
B2B
AI stance
AI-native
Project type
Commercial product
Normalized one-liner
ai-powered cad harness generation
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

No Building an AI harness that produces parametric, constraint-driven CAD models inside Autodesk Fusion requires deep mechanical engineering expertise and mastery of complex B-rep geometric kernel APIs.

What it would actually take: Consists of an Autodesk Fusion Python add-in communicating with a backend agent server. The hard problem is generating topologically valid, parametric B-rep feature trees (extrusions, fillets, sketches with constraints) via LLM code generation rather than simple meshes/STLs, requiring deep understanding of the Fusion 360 C++/Python API and geometric kernel mathematics.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: FreeCAD, SolidWorks, OnShape, Cursor, OpenSCAD

Concerns raised: Training data access and product history availability, AI in CAD is solutions searching for a problem, Token limit constraints during modeling, Survival risk for wrapper companies before acquisition, Usefulness compared to manual CAD work for simple tasks

Feature requests: FreeCAD integration, Parametric library parts with multiple configurations, PCB design with EMI understanding, Generate macros/scripts for CAD tree interaction, OpenSCAD kernel with NURBS and STEP output

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 80 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #10 of 81 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 177 days after the earliest competitor.

Other launches for this product

Same idea, different domain

Nobody's really built a agent / copilot tool for Agriculture yet.