undefined | Better HN

0 pointssnide9d ago0 comments

Hey, I'm the OP. I originally started with FreeCAD. There's not much to "hook up" to Claude. It can natively write for FreeCAD. You don't need to use the FreeCAD editor and can point to an external, local file with an import. At that point there's not much more than pointing your LLM to that file. You'll need to tell the FreeCAD desktop app to update on changes.

Eventually I moved to JSCAD for the application mentioned in my blog post because I realized I wanted a more complex UI (which meant a web app) than what FreeCAD provided natively. If you're looking for something simple with some var statements though, FreeCAD might be enough.

In my experience, the MCP isn't really needed. Claude at least already can write the code pretty well. The problems are more with getting it to understand the output, which the blog post covers.

0 comments

mijoharas9d ago

Sorry what format of local file can it work with?

I can see it working with scad, and then having that generate some things. I'd imagine it'd struggle with an STL file. I don't know much about the format of FCStd files but I'd find that surprising if it worked fine. Obviously three.js code and everything it could be alright with.

It might be my lack of knowledge, because I've mostly just used Freecad to create and edit things and then just exported to STL (which doesn't feel like the thing Claude would be good at modifying)

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 pointssnide9d ago0 comments

In my experience, the MCP isn't really needed. Claude at least already can write the code pretty well. The problems are more with getting it to understand the output, which the blog post covers.

0 comments

mijoharas9d ago

Sorry what format of local file can it work with?

It might be my lack of knowledge, because I've mostly just used Freecad to create and edit things and then just exported to STL (which doesn't feel like the thing Claude would be good at modifying)

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse