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Been through the same journey -- and have been super annoyed each year when I paid the several hundred dollar license for a tool I didn't use much, but really needed when I did use it.

My exit has been FreeCAD with an MCP-bridge, letting me talk to an agent that implements my requests directly in the FreeCAD file I have open. Works super well with FreeCAD which has all the features I need, but where they can be hard to discover.

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Out of curiosity, how do you tell the agent what you want - just describing it in words? Or draw something and scan it in?

I can't tell you how the parent commentor does it, but I saw an excellent reproduction of some historical building done by Astra in headless blender, using photographs, blueprints, and contemporary descriptions. Frontier models are smart enough to incorporate just about any kind of evidence you can give them about what you want, so give them everything.

I've used Claude (Opus) and Gemini (Argon) for Blender for some 3D printing. The work reasonably well, I'll have to try Astra next.

Same. Working in FreeCAD with agents is actually pretty awesome.

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