Posted by dcoulmbe 17 hours ago
The kinds of large scale projects I like to make in SketchUp really began to feel constrained at a certain point. A modeler with SketchUp's incredible UI that can take full advantage of any computer's available graphics hardware to render large amounts of geometry more efficiently would be a wonderful thing.
I'm very possessive of my SketchUp models, and so the idea of storing them on any kind of cloud server I don't have control over is abhorrent to me. I was not happy to see Trimble putting so much effort into making a web-based modeler.
This comes up so often it's good to explain what happened there.
They were not out to extract value from consumer.
They retargeted the offering to professional engineering and architecture firms.
SketchUp was originally an offering for the AEC market. Then Google bought it and essentially pivoted it to consumer offering. Then Trimble bought it and pivoted it back.
I do realize this hurts the person who is a non-professional user but AFAIK SketchUp sales have never been better.
So it's not a pivot out of stupidity or malice, it's just a pivot.
The main customers - engineering and architecture companies - seem to be fine with it.
If you were an engineer CAD manager it would be odd to pay hundreds per seat a year for a product consumers can get for a pittance. So it's about pricing power I guess as well.
And do agree as a consumer there should be better options.
" in search of "
Trimble didn't need to search anything. They knew very well what the market is.
They could have a handled the consumer market retreat better.
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.
You can set up a digital twin of your actual workshop, with config-driven models of table/band/miter/hand saws, router tables, drill press, chisels and rasps, all sorts of fun.
I recently added a jig system too, so you can build jigs that you can actually use, both in your shop and in the tool. It's all drivable by a human or an MCP, and has video and plan authoring and sharing built in.
I've been building this as a labor of love since getting laid off in April, it's all completely free to use and people have made some really damn cool plans with it.
- Flatten aboard: https://studio.flet.dev/run/46tp8GPq9g/
- Make rabbeted box w/ optional sliding lid: https://community.carbide3d.com/t/rabbet-box-designer-on-fle... (working on a hinged option now)
drawing on what I learned putting together: https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview and https://willadams.gitbook.io/design-into-3d
If you ever have/get any, a photo of any of the things on your site, actually built, would be a cool addition—make it real.
I have a few projects that are in progress while continuing to build out ShopSpec. This is so that I can address any rough edges as they come up. For instance, material handling and safety during sheet breakdown.
I signed up inside a minute of opening it :)
There is a name for it: "enshitification" is the strategy of maximizing short term gains, even if that results in product suicide on the long run.
Trimble bought Sketchup 14 years ago. In the world of commercial software, that's a decent run and they seem to be going strong. They just aren't interested in the nickel-and-dime world of selling to and dealing with consumers.
I wanted to have that data model and SketchUp had this amazing cool thing where all plugins (which were written in Ruby) used to be running in the same space and so I could access the runtime of any other plugin. Here the team of OpenStudio were kind enough to share some of their internal APIs with me and so I could take their model and append my own data on top and let my users reuse all of their models from OpenStudio.
And then SketchUp web came and that whole plugin world was crashed. This forced me to go down the path of using a union-of-all-industry-file-formats (like TIFF for pictures) for building energy called gbXML, back then no one supported the file and so it was hopeless (and hard to implement) and eventually trying to create a CAD, which given the state of tech at 2016~2017 was hopeless too, and so it failed miserably.
Seeing this now, I was wondering how hard would it be to recreate that project with its own full CAD from KetchUp...
Would be worth trying with AI to help you develop it. Probably not too hard if you could spend a few weekends on it.
It's not too hard but I can tell "few" means "few hundred" at least.
Need a 3D modeler? Use Claude or codex to build the 3D model first, then build the modeler around it as you iterate towards what you want to build
So many times I’ve had to spend hours learning a software, reading docs, doing tutorials, only to later be able to do a small basic idea of what I actually wanted to do in the first place
Now I can just build only the software I need, for the thing I need it for (or, ala REA, maybe either modify or reverse engineer some existing software, to better fit my workflows)
In that sense, it would also be cool to be able to drive KetchUp with an agent. I’m a big fan of what pen.dev has done (although now their tool is not free/open anymore)
It’s always more work than it looks. You can get to mostly usable tools quickly if your request isn’t too difficult, but every time I use them I run into another thing that needs to be fixed, changed, clarified, or cleaned up.
It’s fun at first, but over time you realize you’re spending more time building the tools than using the tools to build the thing you originally wanted to work on.
I think personal software is best for highly specific tools or for things you need to use repeatedly for a very long time.
For something like a SketchUp competitor, I wouldn’t want to try to maintain my own. The number of edge cases and features is bigger than you imagine up front, and the vibecoded version that might appear a few hours after your prompt is going to be very far from the version you want to use.
The vibecoded apps all rely on an army of users exploring the program and reporting all the bugs and edge cases. You don’t want to be doing that on your own.
it seems like the open-source space is losing some aspects of collaboration. people used to search for already existing projects on some git-hosters, maybe fork them or put effort into the existing thing. now half a dozen people each run their own race using AI, each solution misses 30% of the features and has x-amounts of bugs.
work together ffs :( i mean, 20 people can use AI to vibecode the same project, why does everyone now feel the need to do everything solo. (because they want to be the prolific founder and cool dude who did the most in the project* instead of being one of many contributors, i assume...)
*or rather, their AI.
I'm not too sure what the future here looks like and if this is even a problem, but things certainly are changing. These days submitting a well written bug report or feature suggestion, or validating existing reports is more useful than sending a PR.
Right, and that's something I already argued for since the very beginning of GenAI, namely that suddenly being very costly, economically and ecologically, is not that bad if you build upon what exists and collaborate on progress.
... except that's exactly WHY vibecoded project exist : they do NOT have to give a shit with existing codebase and agree on weird rules. They just start from "scratch". In fact I'm convinced there is the Ikea effect at play, namely that the PM of the vibe coded project is emotionally attached, even proud, of the result they think they provided somehow, despite them not actually doing it. Obviously for-profit GenAI companies have a big incentive to maximize token use and will never promote workflows and tool that minimize the one thing they monetize.
So even though I agree in theory, in practice I think there is little to no overlap.
I have lot of tools that work for me.
When externalities break them, it's usually one prompt to fix them.
To be fair neither is quite as complex as a whole 3D modeller.
> To be fair neither is quite as complex as a whole 3D modeller.
Once you cross a certain complexity in your project, it becomes quite work intensive even using AI to do the coding. All the back and forth and cleaning up, exploring ideas and starting from scratch again takes time and effort and maybe most importantly, extensive human thinking. Just to clarify, I am not against AI and use it extensively myself. But vieb-coding all your tools is just not really a feasable idea for most (time/token-cost constraint) if you tools are of a certain complexity.
But you could easily vibe code, e.g. an H.265 decoder, even though it is super complex.
AI can get the implementation done just fine but in my experience it needs guidance because it can't guess what features and details I want / don't want.
The difference to "before" is that it's now possible at all for me to get personal projects to a working state but in sum they still require a few hours every now and then supervising.
My personal projects matter a lot. For some of them I am trusting my private data in the code, so I need to hold it to a high security and privacy standard. For others, I have hundreds or thousands of users (game mods, helper tools for hobbies, etc.), and I don't want to ship low quality to them.
If it doesn’t matter then do what you want. By definition, it doesn’t matter.
Some of us actually use these tools, so it does matter. You do have to consider things when it matters.
It’s amazing that you can get something usable quickly, but then every time you use the software you’re back in the AI working on your tool.
Using AI to build the tool becomes the project, replacing the project that led you to think about vibecoding a tool.
For instance in the context of this SketchUp clone that might mean using AI to generate an addon for Blender.
For some of my recent projects I'm using the community edition of Odoo to serve as that substrate because it already has an established community of modules to draw from, ten years or so of real world use, and I don't have to burn tokens generating a user account system with permissions or the data models / ORM to interface with them.
This seems to be serving me well, but we'll see. It could be that I end up in the same the tool becoming the project scenario that you describe, just a little bit later than if I had started from a blank slate.
At least that's my experience.
Small tools with few features is great. a 3D modeler is not that.
I suspect people saying "everyone will vibe code all their software" have never actually tried to vibe code a meaningfully complex application.
I have no doubt as a newcomer you can make software that will do what you want, but most likely the outcome will no be good, not because of yourself or the tool, but rather because the expertise to map the problem space to the solution space is not trivial, and that's precisely what requires a new way to think, and thus tools that aren't so easy to learn. It's not poor UX.
"So many times I’ve had to spend hours learning a software, reading docs, doing tutorials, only to later be able to do a small basic idea of what I actually wanted to do in the first place
Now I can just build only the software I need, for the thing I need it for"
Or another way to put it for devs “A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.” ― Alan J. Perlis
I think it comes down to where you want to spend your time and attention.
You’ve likely just switched hobbies to your Blender clone instead of what you wanted to make.
Like, I have to imagine that 80% of the "quick stuff" people need to do in Blender would be done with:
* create quad * exude like 5 times * done
Maaaybe
* perform boolean operation between object and a circle or 3
---
Like, I have less than 200 hours in Blender and I was pretty functional after like ... 30 minutes to an hour of a single tutorial.
Before that, though, I think you have to learn what the experts do and what can be done and what you should want. And then you can start to make your own opinions.
By then, unless the major players have done it really wrong, you're not going to make something better than what already exists.
Right now, it's different, because we have that experience prior to the ability to just wish up an app and have it happen.
I think the value of adapting full tools to your own workflow far outweighs the maintenance costs nowadays. The tool above for instance took my agent a couple hours and it was good to go. It wasn’t a small slice by any means either: it supports edit/obj mode, extrude, loop cuts, modifiers like subdiv, save/load, undo/redo, bones, auto rig, posing, and more.
Mind you, this is a slice of an open source tool which was still outside of what I wanted from it. Cost wasn’t even part of the equation here.
I could start from scratch obviously - but seems a shame.
I think both those apps are great and happy to know folks like you are maintaining them; this one though is simply more of a personal software than a path to an OSS project!
One of the tools (built for me to score options of different assets): https://id-le.com/review/intro-logo-animation
Video: https://youtube.com/shorts/tlI9_XBuqVk
Repo: https://github.com/nicobrenner/id-le
Online: https://id-le.com/
Since Blender is OSS, you could probably use one of the existing VR views for Blender and write a bunch of in-app Python scripts to do what you want, if you wanted to also be able to output to Blender files and work within Blender already.
This looks like a pretty well-trodden area in Blender.
Adding scripts into an existing product does not serve this.
I think we are entering into a new era where we don’t need to accept fully featured software with all of its decisions should they not fit ours.
And you get battle-tested software and a huge collection of existing plugins, operational modes, export formats, all that. Fully bespoke software for everything you want is a way toward losing interoperability between people and platforms.
But building up as opposed to building down or rewriting is freeing.
I can pull in ideas from Houdini and mix them in. I can use Blender’s source as reference for specific implementations should I need. I can keep my tooling specific to the projects Im working on and design it to fit that as opposed to build a workflow within a software meant to be general purpose.
IMO, this kind of full customization is going to become far more commonplace.
I wonder if Claude Code and other similar tools start to maintain their own base apps that everyone keeps asking for? This would be like a "cache" that makes the requests cheaper/easier to deliver?
Then everyone's "own" apps is really just a customization layer on top of a solid base that already does all the heavy lifting.
So many people are building their own versions of:
- PDF editors
- Word processors
- 3D editors
- Video editors
- Pixel-based image editors
- Vector-based image editors
- CAD editors
etc.
In some of these there are a few flavors as well that are major architectural choices. But most of what people are doing is just playing around with UI and file formats. Much of the functionality is generally the same.
I think they all have been post-trained on specific tasks like building sites, apps, etc and that is a large part of the reason they are pretty good at it.
For the rest, at least so far, I haven't had the collaboration experience but for word processors I can't go back to local files that can't easily be edited/viewed/commented on by multiple people or myself on every device I own.
All these clones of Photoshop and similar tools are mostly dead ends, they are experiments to see if you can do it, but there will be a consolidation around regularly maintained and powerful and complete apps that likely also offer support.
These experiments are dead-ends for the most part long-term. Fun play things, but they will not gain significantly user bases.
Why? Every time someone cripples software in the name of safety it just gets replaced with more capable software that isn't.
Not necessarily. But only if what you need is not available in open source or not achievable by forking open source. Otherwise it’s a waste of money (token) and attention. This is a significantly smaller pool that “build [all] your own tools”.
Although, AI mega corpos would love if we do constantly re-build everything. You can tell by the tendency of the agents to write everything from scratch instead of importing the code that does the same thing or better.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50406927
For an example. Lots of people are now vibe coding their tools.
I think people underestimate what a time investment building your own tool that's of at least medium complexity is, though. It might be worth it if it's something you'll use regularly for a long time, but I don't foresee it being the norm. Even assuming no bugs ever or no performance issues ever and all the architectural decisions made were appropriate (pretty far from current reality), merely describing what you want and how it should behave and look like is a long process, and one that isn't all that enjoyable once you go through it once or twice already.
The existing software that has been around for several years and you kinda dislike is probably much more reliable than your own homebrew, too. Doesn't matter in some cases, matters hugely in others. Learning that your custom video gallery organizer just vanished half your family videos probably isn't very enjoyable, but at least it's easy to recognize it happening. Something more abstract like CAD or 3d printing slicer, ehhh...
Would love to hear advice from people who use CRM tools on the job.
A good visualizer might be useful thought! If that part of the work needs to be validated.
Wat is the point of personal projects if in the end you learned nothing
By outsourcing the modeling to Claude or whatever, you don't learn how to build 3d models on your own. You've become dependent on the LLMs, and you're trivially replaceable by someone who can build 3d models on their own...because they can also learn to tell Claude to do all the work.
Their models are horribly topoligized, which will matter for most use cases for models; and if you’re just using it to make a cube, it’d be better to learn the related program to do that.
People tend to ask LLMs to make full art pieces (a decade of specialized knowledge and muscle memory), not “draw me a square”.
In 3d art, there is a gulf between the easy stuff and the hard stuff.
Tl; dr: for 3d art, I agree.
I'm a very casual user of SketchUp (I use it once every few months), but I have a single file which is a detailed model of my house, which I have invested many hours in creating, and that only works on the full Desktop app. So the free web app is not an option for me. And a subscription doesn't make financial sense so I have to ask for a new trial every time I have a home renovation project and I need to modify my model. I'm aware that eventually they might refuse a new trial (they haven't yet) and that day I will just stop using it and learn Blender.
However, I'm now realizing that at least for home renovation projects, an essential feature is the SketchUp 3D Warehouse, where you can download user shared models of a TV, a toaster, a chair, etc. Specially for a casual user, you don't need to have the exact model of your real chair, just a chair will do. So the warehouse is an essential part of the value.
I'm sure there are alternatives for free models other than SketchUp 3D Warehouse, but having it directly in SketchUp is super convenient.
Impressive how good that rust UI feels in a browser though. Even the text rendering is impressive. Maybe rust really is the future of cross platform web+mobile apps.
I will still continue to pay for the things i truly get value out of and are in my opinion reasonably priced. To support the creators.
Seems unlikely that people are going to spend their Claude sub every month maintaining the thing either. They'll move onto the next cheap LLM project and dedicate their tokens to that.
Im sure that's not every project, but Id rather just have something reliable with a reputation. AI clones are killing open source's reputation for me, I just dont trust anything now.
Not to mention how easy it would be to get a malicious PR approved into a public repo who's maintainer relies solely on the competency of a cheap llm.
ArtCraft is also pretty cool but I have my Affinity Photo 2 Licenses so I do not realy need these currently.
If it was crocheting, I would get it, but woodworking is not an inexpensive hobby where the software becomes the top line item.
This here I would also use at my job whera I am a bit of a Jack of all trades so once a quarter I need to sketch some model of something to see if it would fit or not. Example would be right now i need to sketch a simple collision protection for a outdoor cable tray (for Solar Pannel Strings). Gonna not take me longer than an hour. I do not use it enough to justify spending 40 Bucks a Month 4 times a year.
Its just that often times, even us programmers seem reticent to pay for software even though we happily throw dollars across the counter for a sugary coffee somewhere.
I know of sketch up primarily from DYI magazines, hence the assumption.
EDIT: latest release switched to BenchUp fro KetchUp. Let me assume it's and attempt to duck infringement.
Gained a huge user base quickly then sold to Google who wanted it apparently to help people toy around in Google earth, then they did little with it and eventually sold to Trimble, mostly a surveying company, who similarly had hopes it would help expand their users and market reach, which it hasnt really its mostly still evades commercial revenues and continues to be used by the same kind of users as originally
Going to have to try this!