This thread has turned into a great resource! build123d has been my favourite conceptually so far (it's just Python) but vcad looks very clean too. I like the abuse of + and - in both of these for booleans.
I gave build123d a try about a year ago. I really wanted it to work, but it has a lot of issues, mainly in documentation. I'm going off memory here, and it's been a while, so maybe some of these have been fixed. One of the biggest issues is one of the fundamental classes (I want to say "Part") is not documented at all. And it's essentially the most important class. I tried enumerating all of the methods on the class, but didn't make much progress. Fillets were promising, but it seems once you've got a complex edge from a few operations it quits working, or at least did for my part. You're supposed to be able to do something like b=Box(10,10,10), then access the width as b.width, but all of those properties were always zero.
OpenSCAD supposedly supports Python now (https://pythonscad.org/), but I was not able to get it to work at all. I've fallen back to just OpenSCAD, even though it has limitations, at least I'm familiar with them. I'm mostly just waiting for improvements to anything that'll make it better than OpenSCAD.
i got really carried away making a contoured split-keyboard in build123d, and affirm there are some gaps in docs and functionality -- eg. it was quite tricky to get the center of an object in the right form (vector, position, or location), and often zero otherwise. i think a lot of it boils down to an OOP hierarchy with a lot of inherited or generit methods that aren't applicable or impl'ed. OpenCascade causes its own geom issues too, and by the end i was fighting build123d just to slap absolute-position--based hacks over inadvertantly invalid geometry. the dev team's interest in llm-generated code does not inspire confidence that it will become more reliable.
but i found-out up-thread that libfive, which i was esp. interested in for more reliable geom, has a Rust-based successor in Fidget -- and there's even a parametric split-keyboard that can be contrasted with my (static, hack-ier, but single-file) build123d iteration. exited to follow suit!
I've had a few experiences in France, as recently as a month ago. Not speaking French (I do not) is not generally a problem, no one seems to mind. What some parts of Europe do mind is being too... How do I put this politely... Obviously from certain places with very little sensitivity for where in the the world they happen to be at the time. Often loudly.
Glad to know I'm not the only one that thinks along these lines, and presumably by extension that teleportation by delete and rebuild mechanics would be mass murder.
You might no longer be you in the sense of you behave quite differently, but I remember being 16 and I don't behave like that either. The discontinuity is the point, as you eloquently put it.
I've found recent versions of Claude and codex to be reluctant in this regard. They will recognise the problem they created a few minutes ago but often behave as if someone else did it. In many ways that's true though, I suppose.
Does it do this for really cut and dry problems? I’ve noticed that ChatGPT will put a lot of effort into (retroactively) “discovering” a basically-valid alternative interpretation of something it said previously, if you object on good grounds. Like it’s trying to evade admitting that it made a mistake, but also find some say to satisfy your objection. Fair enough, if slightly annoying.
But I have also caught it on straightforward matters of fact and it’ll apologize. Sometimes in an over the top fashion…
Not get stuck on an incorrect train of thought, not ignore core instructions in favour of training data like breaking naming conventions across sessions or long contexts, not confidently state "I completely understand the problem and this will definitely work this time" for the 5th time without actually checking. I could go on.
I've just come off a 2 month bender using Claude Code for, well, far too much. I had 5 instances running at once for days on end. It felt amazing, it felt like flying. And then something gave way and I couldn't focus on anything for 3 days. Diagnosed with ADHD some time ago I fell into this kind of trap well before LLM's, but not to this degree.
So I'm writing code by hand today and using Claude to track down type and dependency errors. It feels good, I might do this for a while.
I know you're feeling. Similarly, diagnosed with ADHD early last year. I also went on a Claude Code bender basically since the turn of the new year; I like the term "bender", it really does feel that way.
I have also had to step back, for my own sanity, and approach how I am using these tools. They are very strong slot machines, especially Claude models which require more steering, and that's not a good match with my brain and work style. You're not alone! Keep on trying to work better :)
Nzer but some cultural overlap between here and Aus, that’s far too advanced. Auckland for eg has almost unusable busses and trains but the answer to congestion is apparently to make it impossible to park in the cbd, rather than make any actual improvements.
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