Comment by taylorfinley | Hacker News Reader

Comment by taylorfinley | Hacker News Reader

I got laid off at the end of April and have been building my own personal dream tool since, it's a skeuomorphic carpentry simulator with an agent MCP. You start with real wood specs and a shop full of miter saws, router tables, table saws and the like. Think of it like Sketchup but no extruding rectangles.

It's been really fun to build with. Agents can create parametric procedures so e.g. stick framing becomes a simple function call for the next agent, building a flywheel. There is full agent-human parity in every surface, so there is a human UI for the procedures too.

Every operation is yaml, so agents pick it up pretty quickly. Agents can also file feature requests when they reach for a tool that doesn't exist. You can export to 3d printing files, video walk-through, step files, get a BOM and a cut plan, view your project in life-size with AR. There is a notion-like interface for authoring build guides... a lot going on. If you're a woodworker/software engineer you might enjoy it.

You can add the MCP to your agent of choice, send a picture, description, sketch or whatever; say "build this with Sawdust"

https://sawdust.diy

Love it, I had a similar but probably worse idea a few years back while woodworking. I agree the issue with essentially all CAD and sketchup etc is it forces you to work with primitives that are different from your real world ones. Extruding shapes as you said, instead of actually milling lumber and working in common known dimensions.

I also suspect there’s a fairly finite number of sane join primitives, you can have rabbets, dados, dominos, dovetails, pocket screws, etc. These could be experimented with digitally against an existing design. And your tool availability could determine what you can do.

And of course cut order and assembly is just a DAG and can be generated from geometric constraints of the actual design.

> I also suspect there’s a fairly finite number of sane join primitives, you can have rabbets, dados, dominos, dovetails, pocket screws, etc. These could be experimented with digitally against an existing design. And your tool availability could determine what you can do.

> And of course cut order and assembly is just a DAG and can be generated from geometric constraints of the actual design.

That's exactly it! It's a well-constrained space, and some amazing utility falls out as a consequence of using real-world materials and operations instead of cad-native primitives.

Have been building something non-CAD too in the space which is also aligned with carpentry. This looks really neat and can't believe how similar the functionality is. Would be great to chat!

https://shopspec.io/app

Shopspec looks very cool! Love to see people building in this direction, we have at least validated for each other that the demand for a tool like this has a minimum bound of at least 2.

Feel free to reach out! Email in profile.

Wishing you all the best with this project. Super cool.

If you are looking to improve the mcp, you should try adding a UI to it (see https://apps.extensions.modelcontextprotocol.io/api/). And the server happens to be in python, you should check out: https://mplemay.github.io/belgie/examples/mcp/. It is a project I have been working on which makes it easy to build MCP UIs from python.

Cool project. A couple of years ago I was gifted "One-Plank Woodworking Projects" by Andy Standing for Christmas (which is great). It's a book of plans for things you can build with, obviously, one standard plank of wood. That might be a decent addition to the filters: rather than project type or tools available, what wood does the user has to hand.

Hey, looks like we both have a thing with 3D, love it! Mine is about bouldering, check it out https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49234599

Very cool! I was just today thinking I should have an AI help me design a new piece of furniture I've been thinking about, and send it off to a CNC shop.

The MCP server seems to have a bug. The tool list flashes for a second in Claude Desktop, but then immediately states "This connector has no tools available." and the error "Couldn’t reload tools from the server." when I try to refresh it.

Thanks for reporting the issue, it should be fixed now. Make sure to fully remove and then re-connect the MCP, and let me know what you think! If you like you can describe what you're building here and I'll make a demo of how I would prompt it.

This is amazing I been wanting something like for a long time. I'm also curious whats up with the no VC logo at the bottom of the page?

Thanks for the kind words! NOVC [0] is kind of like "BPA Free" for saas, in my case it's a pledge that this software will remain indie and founder-led and not be subject to enshittification pressures that can come from taking certain types of investment.

I spent the last 5 years working at a bn+ valuation YC fintech; I naturally started to apply to YC with this project, but kept feeling internal pressure to make it something different from my vision in order to get to that bn+ unicorn status. Not every cool idea needs to corner an industry, ya know? I'd rather build this tool for 100 people like me and not gate a bunch of features behind paywalls. I live off-grid on acerage in Hawaii and paid off my mortgage and car loan, so my income needs are low. It would be nice to replace that 6 figure SV income one day, but I have a young family. There are different kinds of wealth, ya know?

[0] https://novc.fyi

Awesome! Built a sliding keyboard desk with a drawer for an 88 key MIDI controller. I've been wanting to custom build one of these for a while, this will help! https://app.sawdust.diy/share/b5362e61-39bc-4fa5-a537-38ca78...

This is amazing! So cool to see people using the tool. Thank you for sharing.

This sounds a lot like a project I’ve started a few times and never made it far with. I called it woodlang. It was the idea of CAD but rather than designing the shape and figuring how to make it that shape, you specify a series of shop operations like blender geometry nodes.

This was all pre AI. Super impressive that you’ve made something awesome. I’ll try it out tonight

> skeuomorphic

I keep seeing this word. Every time, I have to look it up; I marvel at the fact that we have such a cool word describing a complex but interesting topic; and apparently forget it again. And then I never find a situation where I can use it.

This was used quite extensively when iOS was first released.

I don’t say this lightly, and confess I haven’t dug in very deeply yet, but this is one of the most hot shit uses of ML I think I’ve stumbled across yet.

If this does what I think it does (and I confess I’m a goddamn idiot still when it comes to anything involving ‘agentic’) this is honestly pretty damn amazing.

That's pretty cool. I built a barn door on rollers (some suspending it, some rolling on a concrete floor) last year and this would have certainly aided in visualising where I was going with it.

This is absolutely fantastic. Bravo. I'm excited to use it!

Please consider adding metric measuremts support though. My brain can't work in fractions of an inch.

I encourage you to turn this into a real sellable product.

Just tried it. This looks amazing! Quick question: how does it handle realistic material waste or blade kerf when generating the cut plan?

This is actually the source of the project's name, "know your project, down to the sawdust" -- Blade kerf is fully accounted for, the dimension itself is a property of each tool that can make a cut, so you can configure your own custom blade widths as needed. Off-cuts are always kept, unless explicitly discarded in the burn barrel. Project yield is also calculated, so you can spot an issue right away if you're doing something inefficient.

For each build, it would be so cool to list the projects that I can make with the off cuts and scraps.

Wow! Gotta try that out! I'm from outside the USA, hopefully it'll work too with SI units

SI units are intended to be supported, but I am unfamiliar with commonly-available wood sizes in non-US markets so it is thoroughly untested and likely a bit of a disaster. Bug reports are appreciated and can be filed by clicking the lightbulb in the chat window or asking an agent to file it via the MCP.

As a stopgap, maybe just allow one to convert all units to metric at export time.

This is 1) impressive and 2) super high utility and 3) solves a real problem. Awesome stuff.

This is wonderful. Does it support complex types of joinery?

I recently added a chisel and hand saw tool and started working on adding more complex joinery types. Right now any of the frontier models can easily handle half laps and pocket jig miters and the like. You can chat with the model and have it develop a procedure for any kind of joinery if you give it the right resources, if you do so I would love it if you ask the agent to nominate it as a community procedure.

Looks awesome! If I may, could you add meters support?

Nice to see unique applications with Agents. Well done!

The homepage doesn’t load well on iPad

Thank you, I will take a look! I think my poor little vps is getting a bit of the hn hug of death, too :)

good luck, nice idea, agents are fun and a bit scary sometimes!

This is really cool!

This is sick.

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