One very unfortunate curse we are stuck with is LLM providers pulling the rug from under us and swapping models with quantized versions during peak demand or on monthly plans. You never know if that's the reason AI starts writing shitty code or it's just the context size that has grown. On top of that there is the queuing mechanism which makes tasks take longer. Sometimes AI is super fast and sometimes a simple task takes 10, 15 or even 20 minutes of "thinking". You may not realize this if you are just using your same subscription but if you switch between providers you can immediately tell. I advise everyone to invest $5 in openrouter, deepseek and qwencode. Just do an experiment and use same model (deepseek-4.1 flash) asking same prompt on same code, then look at the result. Spoiler: you will see trash coming out of openrouter at 1-5 tokens/second, you will see slightly faster and better quality output from qwencloud and when you get to deepseek API where you are paying per token you will not believe this is the same model. Because it isn't.
I don’t mean to advertise OpenAI - let’s make it clear, fuck OpenAI - but I’ve never seen a degradation like that in Codex. All models have always seemed completely stable over their release lifetime. Meanwhile, I rolled back my attempts at using open weight models because providers start throwing “too many requests” errors after just a few requests and the pricing is roughly 10x worse for same model quality, except the inference is much slower. Getting your weights silently downgraded sounds like fun.
OpenAI does the same, the day Astra released I asked it to make a game, it made a really detailed beautiful blender model and some gameplay elements.
A week later, same prompt, really low poly blender model. Either they reduced token usage per person, or they quantized the model, idk, but it really doesn’t work as good as day of release anymore
I keep hearing these anecdotes, but never see it in practice, nor in benchmarks. Do you think it's possible that there exists someone who asked Astra to make a game and they got an ugly one on day 1 and a nicer one later? And don't you think blender modeling is a bit of a "svg of a pelican" problem? It's not what the type of task the model is trained to be doing, and I wouldn't really expect the results to be particularly good or reproducible.
People don't have time (or even mental capability / even more time) to learn CAD but they have a task at hand which they want done. If AI can generate a part which is "good enough" for the user at a cost that the user considers reasonable (I.e. zero) then AI gets used. If a part fails thats rarely a concern because these parts are just 3d printed and likely cost single digit cents in filament. User can always print a new one.
Right, but the thing that I think sort of militates against this scenario is this:
If a non-CAD person imagines a part that they need, the chances are very high indeed that either it isn't what they need, can't be made robustly or sensibly, or if it is, it already exists in some meaningful way that can be adapted, because one of tens of millions of other people already wanted it.
This scenario — needing something very specific that can be described only in words and nobody else has ever needed before — is almost imaginary. Most stuff just isn't like that.
Now… if someone were to design an AI CAD package that could remix objects that exist and combine them, perhaps with a GUI tool that allowed a user to identify attachment points, maybe that would be interesting. But a lot of that has been solved in non-AI GUIs already.
Text-to-CAD just isn't as good an idea as it seems. You are not going to be able to magic up some novel invention from a text description without a significant amount of domain knowledge of the words needed to describe a part, and that domain knowledge usually comes from learning CAD!
(Bit like getting a coding agent to write really good code)
And simple parts, sorry, just don't need much CAD skill. Get a CAD package on a free plan, learn enough to make your thing. You will get so much more out of that and it will be easier to make changes. It'll probably have standard tools for adding threads, even.
Even image-to-CAD for a functional part requires a significant amount of understanding of what to photograph and from which angles, etc.
Dude, coat hanger joint is broken. The free chatgpt gives openscat file I can just paste and convert to stl. I didn't even measure the diameter of the pipe, apparently those are standard. In 10 minutes I have a new 3d printed part to fix my coat hanger. No CAD UI app subscriptions, not reading CAD books or whatever. That's real life. Rest is in your mind.
We are doing AI screening. Candidate works with AI for 15 minutes and session is recorded. We review real output not AI generated resume. If candidate can get AI to apply and produce meaningful output then maybe we should hire that candidate. Currently outputs are manually reviewed but easy enought to have AI screen outputs.
The inundation of AI applications is shitty, but I think this side of the coin—AI interviewer—is even worse. This is degrading for a human applicant, and after the very immediate term it’s probably not going to be very useful. Instead of grinding leetcode, people are going to be grinding the AI interview, which is depressing to even consider. Not only that, but there’s also going to be an arms race of AI tools that can ace the AI interview for you.
Oh if only cut and paste was broken... In Windows and Linux copy and paste itself is broken. Sometimes you copy with mouse, sometimes you copy with keyboard, and if it is a recent version of MS Office likely neither will work. Sometimes you paste with Ctrl+v sometimes with Ctrl+shift+v, sometimes with mouse, sometimes it just won't work. Such a simple operation should have been completely owned by the OS.
It works very reasonable on Linux/X11 with two separate clipboards - one for Ctrl+C/V and one for selection / middle click paste.
Ctrl+Shift+C/V is only necessary for terminals that already have other historical pre-GUI conventions for the Ctrl+ combinations - and you can always use a terminal emulator that lets you use Ctrl+C/V with the GUI semantics.
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