Show HN: CADara – I made an open-source in-browser CAD | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: CADara – I made an open-source in-browser CAD

cadara.app

37 pointsttouch13 comments

This is the pre-alpha/alpha release of a new CAD that I created. It uses OpenCascade 7.9 under the hood via WASM and a custom sketch solver written in typescript (substantially faster than I thought it would be)

Right now it can do most of the CAD stuff that one expects apart from anything that involves meshes or curved face manipulation - that'll come soon but I want to have a stable base first before I move any further

I hope you like it, I'm eager to hear your thoughts!

Will this project eventually be able to completely replace MechE software students need to use for classes or what is the intentions about your software’s scope

the target audience (which I'm a part off too) is hobbyist and small shops. Competing with the big giants I think is impossible (SolidWorks/Fusion/onShape/etc.) but I think that the vast majority of people use only a very small subset of features

Interoperability is of paramount importance and it's probably going to be the best deep dive

err.. seems like many of the UI elements taken straight from OnShape?

https://www.onshape.com

It's vibe coded, so not surprising that it replicates the patterns of existing systems.

That's true but some years ago that I tried to develop a very similar product/project I went mostly on the same path. as another comment states, UI is a great place NOT to re-invent the wheel

Also changing CAD programs is already hard enough and having very similar UI/UX is a feature, not a by-product of agentic coding.

Also in many cases I honestly can't think of a better way to do stuff

UI is a great place NOT to reinvent things that don't need to be reinvented. Rip off the best and forget the rest.

Whether OnShape is the "best" or not, I have no idea, but the point stands.

that was the idea and this is such a huge project that I kept as much variables static as possible. I want the app to feel close to what people already know - and that applies to me as a user too (I want to use the app too after all!)

IANAL, but I'd be surprised if the UI icons are not covered under copyright.

The opportunity to vibe code and reinforce with something like claud code for example will poach any application that thinks they have the market share and charge whatever the hell they want. I am very excited for projects like this where you leverage open source for a very specific user and offer alternatives to SAAS. Keep iterating and solidy you security and make sure you get direct feedback from experienced CAD users, which I am not. good luck

Thank you very much!

That is exactly my take, though I'm ramping down the agents for the time being - 90% of the functionality is there and it's time to pay back the engineering time that I borrowed :P

I have a lot of experience developing CAD (before the AI boom) and while it made 0 sense to burn 1-2 years of my life to produce a similar MVP, now that I HAVE this MVP, it makes a ton of sense to pour my time on it

Also I'm gonna tackle some more god-problems with agents, like reversing the sldprt/f3d filetypes to allow importing them without losing history and more - each of this would require years of engineering hours and even achieving the 80% that agentic coding does is something that has never been done before

Good job. How long did it take you to build it?

I heavily used LLM agents and it took about a month - of course I'm already starting to pay back the gained time

The development as I see it for such a project is about a year so I expect to take roughly 6 months to iron out the weird slop here and there

Having said that, the project right now is at an astonishing point and, in fear of jinxing myself, it works. Yea there are the occasional UI bugs here and there (incorrect tool grouping, incorrect tool icons, etc.) but welp, it does what I mostly want it to

Side note: I've done a similar project before and have tons of experience around building similar products, this is not an "AI success/AI will take your job" story - far from it

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