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Show HN: Aircad – Professional drafting and 3D modeling in the browser
81 points38 comments0.7 average comments/hourSubmitted by peetle
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Submission text
Aircad is a professional CAD system running in the browser with deep AI integration. It includes professional grade drafting and documentation tools, NURBS-based solid modeling, and a lot more. You can make professional quality design documents with it. It is all integrated behind a scripting API that can do anything you can do in the interface and also perform complex modeling operations efficiently. It reads and writes file formats like DXF, DWG, STEP, and 3DM.
I built Aircad because I was frustrated with what was out there. Current CAD tools are expensive and slow to improve. New features barely move the needle. With Aircad, you have fast, powerful geometry tools for just about anything, from conceptual models to your final design.
The newer generation of web-based CAD isn’t comprehensive enough to complete a project or is slower than existing desktop products because it sends performance-sensitive work to a server (OnShape), or isn’t designed to scale to real work in a collaborative setting (many "toy" CAD tools).
Current CAD collaboration workflows are fragile, costly, and complex. They’re file-based and separate the design artifacts (eg PDFs) from the source. Collaboration is often an expensive add-on that raises your subscription, is hard to learn, and feels unnatural. Aircad builds it in: version history, drawing comparison, forking, and realtime collaboration.
AI in most CAD tools is tacked on as a plug-in instead of being deeply integrated, and those plug-ins are often inefficient, hard to adopt, and costly. Aircad has a built-in AI agent and a comprehensive scripting API with a stage-and-commit workflow, so you know exactly what is happening during a complex change. You can use AI to write new scripts and commands that extend Aircad with repeatable, shareable workflows.
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Figure I try pitching at least, but would you consider evaluating my Aetheris kernel to use as Aircad's geometry kernel over OCCT? https://github.com/yuechen-li-dev/Aetheris There are currently a lot of newer browser CAD projects that already wraps OCCT WASM, like FluidCAD and Chili3D. And as you said previously, current CAD tools are slow to improve, and part of the reason is because of using kernels first built in the 1980s, and projects like Shapr3D and Plasticity both hit limitations of their existing kernels and switched to Parasolid when their project got bigger, and OCCT's per entity tolerance issue is pretty well know by now. On another topic, getting a plate with thousands of holes to mesh in under a second is some serious performance, and I do agree with your conclusion that most CAD apps are slow not because of programming language but because accurate NURBS math is inherently slow, but their is also the issues with the 2D constraint solver and fillet/boolean algorithms too. Happy to talk more about the geometry kernel stuff too.
Comment on Hacker News · 1 direct repliesWhat is the geometry kernel? That's always the first question I have.
Comment on Hacker News · 1 direct repliesTruly nice stuff. I've been looking into getting into 3-d printing recently and wondering could this output the kind of files I could use for that? Truly possibly a noob question, but just wondering if this could do that.
Comment on Hacker News · 2 direct repliesi noticed you dont have step export! why is that? i actually recently stood up my own end to end step reader writer as part of my own cad shenanigans, where i can have time to first geometry be in milliseconds even if the overal file is half a gig and physically needs a few seconds to parse. is there some reason why you dont have step export?
Comment on Hacker News · 1 direct repliesI don't want cad. I want CAM. Where are the AI generated CAM clones?
Comment on Hacker News · 3 direct repliesJust checked it out; the whole experience is incredibly smooth.
Comment on Hacker News · 1 direct repliesthe landing page and copy is top quality
Comment on Hacker News · 1 direct repliesThis is super, just checked it out.
Comment on Hacker News · 1 direct repliesCongratulations on launching. I would not bet a business that depends on CAD on something that only costs $19/month. Even if it didn't require taking a dependency on a website. Or to put it AutoCad is cheaper than being sued. Good luck.
Comment on Hacker News · 1 direct repliesCan test it w/o signing in. Pass.
Comment on Hacker News · 1 direct replies