alt Hacker NewsI got laid off at the end of April and have been building my own personal dream tool since, it's a skeuomorphic carpentry simulator with an agent MCP. You start with real wood specs and a shop full of miter saws, router tables, table saws and the like. Think of it like Sketchup but no extruding rectangles.
It's been really fun to build with. Agents can create parametric procedures so e.g. stick framing becomes a simple function call for the next agent, building a flywheel. There is full agent-human parity in every surface, so there is a human UI for the procedures too.
Every operation is yaml, so agents pick it up pretty quickly. Agents can also file feature requests when they reach for a tool that doesn't exist. You can export to 3d printing files, video walk-through, step files, get a BOM and a cut plan, view your project in life-size with AR. There is a notion-like interface for authoring build guides... a lot going on. If you're a woodworker/software engineer you might enjoy it.
You can add the MCP to your agent of choice, send a picture, description, sketch or whatever; say "build this with Sawdust"
Replies
Love it, I had a similar but probably worse idea a few years back while woodworking. I agree the issue with essentially all CAD and sketchup etc is it forces you to work with primitives that are different from your real world ones. Extruding shapes as you said, instead of actually milling lumber and working in common known dimensions.
I also suspect there’s a fairly finite number of sane join primitives, you can have rabbets, dados, dominos, dovetails, pocket screws, etc. These could be experimented with digitally against an existing design. And your tool availability could determine what you can do.
And of course cut order and assembly is just a DAG and can be generated from geometric constraints of the actual design.
Have been building something non-CAD too in the space which is also aligned with carpentry. This looks really neat and can't believe how similar the functionality is. Would be great to chat!
This sounds a lot like a project I’ve started a few times and never made it far with. I called it woodlang. It was the idea of CAD but rather than designing the shape and figuring how to make it that shape, you specify a series of shop operations like blender geometry nodes.
This was all pre AI. Super impressive that you’ve made something awesome. I’ll try it out tonight
Hey, looks like we both have a thing with 3D, love it! Mine is about bouldering, check it out https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49234599
Cool project. A couple of years ago I was gifted "One-Plank Woodworking Projects" by Andy Standing for Christmas (which is great). It's a book of plans for things you can build with, obviously, one standard plank of wood. That might be a decent addition to the filters: rather than project type or tools available, what wood does the user has to hand.
> skeuomorphic
I keep seeing this word. Every time, I have to look it up; I marvel at the fact that we have such a cool word describing a complex but interesting topic; and apparently forget it again. And then I never find a situation where I can use it.
I don’t say this lightly, and confess I haven’t dug in very deeply yet, but this is one of the most hot shit uses of ML I think I’ve stumbled across yet.
If this does what I think it does (and I confess I’m a goddamn idiot still when it comes to anything involving ‘agentic’) this is honestly pretty damn amazing.
That's pretty cool. I built a barn door on rollers (some suspending it, some rolling on a concrete floor) last year and this would have certainly aided in visualising where I was going with it.
Wow! Gotta try that out! I'm from outside the USA, hopefully it'll work too with SI units
This is wonderful. Does it support complex types of joinery?
Nice to see unique applications with Agents. Well done!
I encourage you to turn this into a real sellable product.
This is sick.
This is really cool!
Amazing resource if it takes off.
I wanted to build a bed frame recently and imagined software where I could choose lumber from a list and visually assemble the bed frame in the software how I see fit, choose stains, flourishes - then go order the wood and have it cut. At that point it's like taking home an IKEA bed, except of way higher quality materials and to your exact design spec.
So
> Real SKUs, a real BOM you can send to any lumberyard; understand exactly what you need down to the last nail.
Is especially interesting, it sounds like you could basically do that with this software.
Turning the woodworking process into code to be automated by an LLM is pretty ambitious, and is the part I am most skeptical about. Of course, if you get that right (plus adoption) it would be unbelievably huge.