ToolsMay 1, 2026via Hacker News
Show HN: AI CAD Harness
Why it matters
AI-powered CAD tooling is moving from standalone web apps to integrated agents that live inside professional workflows. Adam's beta launch validates that engineers want AI assistance *within* their existing tools, not as black-box replacements.
Key signals
- Adam launches beta on Autodesk Fusion and PTC Onshape
- Uses FeatureScript and Python APIs for native CAD integration
- Model-agnostic approach—selects frontier models (GPT-5.5, Opus 4.7) per task from internal benchmarks
- Early use cases: feature tree cleanup, renaming, parametrization, filleting
- Competes with Anthropic-Autodesk connector (launched days prior)
- Open-sourced earlier text-to-CAD work (CADAM)
- Founded team previously shipped text-to-3D experiments on HN
The hook
Not a chatbot. Adam ships as a native CAD agent inside Fusion and Onshape—editing your feature tree with full visibility.
Hi HN, I'm Zach, one of the co-founders of Adam (
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 th…