Posted by dcoulmbe 17 hours ago
Problem existed even before AI, with framework names. Headlines like "Planecrash in Ohio gains 50% in one year", "ShowHN: I use car accident to get new customers", "Made my wife happy with broken arm"
i directed pi to their documentation + github repo and created a pretty awesome skill that allows me to take measurements on paper, snap a pic, and then have it generate the drawing. can also snap a general pic and then provide a model number of an item in the pic, and it will maintain scale. this stuff used to take me an hour+!
Feedback: every time I draw a rectangle it asks me to name the object; seems like the wrong default behavior.
yeah this seems insane. The push/pull also doesn't work the way I expect it to. Sketchups main selling point was how easy it was to use and pick up
Every interaction I try on KetchUp has some kind of gotcha. It doesn't snap to grid by default, and as you say, it's insane that I have to name every rectangle. I can't extrude a face with a single click-and-drag of the push/pull tool; instead I've got to select it first with the arrow tool (which strangely does not match how the Move tool behaves), then extrude. Also, clicking and roving through the File/Edit/View/Tools menubar doesn't interact as expected.
Sorry to say, this ain't SketchUp. It seems like yet another flashy vibe-code that has fulfilled an 80% quality level but crumbled on the final 20% of polish that really makes or breaks the user experience. Really feels like the author didn't test-drive it for usability.
And it uses a project called openskp [1] to work with SketchUp files, also AI coded to some extend, but looks reasonable at a glance.
This is great for small scale STL design too
SketchUp 8 was the easiest software for me to learn, and it just clicks with me. I really wanted to learn FreeCAD, but there's something about the way it works that I just can't get along with, so I keep going back to SketchUp.
Later, I tried all the alternatives: Onshape, Fusion, Tinkercad, and the new SolidCraft, but SketchUp still feels so simple and intuitive to me.
I've had better luck with OpenSCAD for simple things, and I still need to try it out with LLMs. That's on my TODO list!
It's also weirdly good at taking an existing STL file of a functional print and writing some python to modify it.
One example was a badge holder that I liked the design of, but only held 2 badges. I wanted 3, plus a slot on the back for a key. Gave it measurements of the key, it grafted a key slot on the back, and added the third badge slot. In typical 3D printing fashion, of course I had to print like 5 iterations of the thing until the sizing of everything actually worked.