Top stories

Hey HN! We’re Will and Jorge, and we’ve built LAD (Language-Aided Design), a SolidWorks add-in that uses LLMs to create sketches, features, assemblies, and macros from conversational inputs (https://www.trylad.com/).

We come from software engineering backgrounds where tools like Claude Code and Cursor have come to dominate, but when poking around CAD systems a few months back we realized there's no way to go from a text prompt input to a modeling output in any of the major CAD systems. In our testing, the LLMs aren't as good at making 3D objects as they are are writing code, but we think they'll get a lot better in the upcoming months and years.

To bridge this gap, we've created LAD, an add-in in SolidWorks to turn conversational input and uploaded documents/images into parts, assemblies, and macros. It includes:

- Dozens of tools the LLM can call to create sketches, features, and other objects in parts.

- Assembly tools the LLM can call to turn parts into assemblies.

- File system tools the LLM can use to create, save, search, and read SolidWorks files and documentation.

- Macro writing/running tools plus a SolidWorks API documentation search so the LLM can use macros.

- Automatic screenshots and feature tree parsing to provide the LLM context on the current state.

- Checkpointing to roll back unwanted edits and permissioning to determine which commands wait for user permission.

You can try LAD at https://www.trylad.com/ and let us know what features would make it more useful for your work. To be honest, the LLMs aren't great at CAD right now, but we're mostly curious to hear if people would want and use this if it worked well.

Hi! I’m Nathan: an ML Engineer at Mozilla.ai: I built agent-of-empires (aoe): a CLI application to help you manage all of your running Claude Code/Opencode sessions and know when they are waiting for you.

- Written in rust and relies on tmux for security and reliability - Monitors state of cli sessions to tell you when an agent is running vs idle vs waiting for your input - Manage sessions by naming them, grouping them, configuring profiles for various settings

I'm passionate about getting self-hosted open-weight LLMs to be valid options to compete with proprietary closed models. One roadblock for me is that although tools like opencode allow you to connect to Local LLMs (Ollama, lm studio, etc), they generally run muuuuuch slower than models hosted by Anthropic and OpenAI. I would start a coding agent on a task, but then while I was sitting waiting for that task to complete, I would start opening new terminal windows to start multitasking. Pretty soon, I was spending a lot of time toggling between terminal windows to see which one needed me: like help in adding a clarification, approving a new command, or giving it a new task.

That’s why I build agent-of-empires (“aoe”). With aoe, I can launch a bunch of opencode and Claude Code sessions and quickly see their status or toggle between them, which helps me avoid having a lot of terminal windows open, or having to manually attach and detach from tmux sessions myself. It’s helping me give local LLMs a fair try, because them being slower is now much less of a bottleneck.

You can give it an install with

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/njbrake/agent-of-empires/m... | bash

Or brew install njbrake/aoe/aoe

And then launch by simply entering the command `aoe`.

I’m interested in what you think as well as what features you think would be useful to add!

I am planning to add some further features around sandboxing (with docker) as well as support for intuitive git worktrees and am curious if there are any opinions about what should or shouldn’t be in it.

I decided against MCP management or generic terminal usage, to help keep the tool focused on parts of agentic coding that I haven’t found a usable solution for.

I hit the character limit on this post which prevented me from including a view of the output, but the readme on the github link has a screenshot showing what it looks like.

Thanks!