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Comment by WillNickols | Hacker News Reader

Curious what you think is the best interface for it? We thought about this ourselves and talked to some folks but it didn't seem there was a clear alternative to chat.

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Solidworks's current controls are the best interface for it. "Draw a picture" is something you're going to find really difficult to beat. Most of the other parametric CADs work the same way, and Solidworks is widely known as one of the best interfaces on top of that. They've spent decades building one that is both unambiguous and fast.

Maybe it's just the engineers I've worked with, but I've never heard anyone describe Solidworks as "fast."

(Of course, you and I know it is, it's just that you're asking it to do a lot)

Haha yes, I've never heard any engineer discribe any CAD package as anything other than slow and full of bugs. But of the alternatives, I think most would still pick Solidworks.

All of our production engineers that use CATIA think SolidWorks is fast...

I guess it's all in the perspective

I wonder how many of these bugs are actually situations where the underlying algorithms are simply confronted with situations outside their valid input domains. This can happen easily with 3d surface representations of geometries.

Modelling isn't the slow part. If one is copying a drawing and have exact dimensions its pretty straightforward in most software even if the software is bloated.

The clear alternative is VR. You put on hand trackers and then physical describe the part to the machine. It should be rid m this wide, gestures, and moves hands that wide.

https://shapelabvr.com/

maybe some combination of visual representation with text. For example it's not easy to come up intuitive with names of operations which could be applied to some surface. But if you could say something like 'select top side of cylinder' and it will show you some possible names of operations (with illustrations/animations) which could be applied to it then it's easy to say back what it need to do without actually knowing what actually possible. So as result it maybe just much quicker way to interact with CAD that we are using currently.

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