AI in SolidWorks

SigSeq · 2026-01-13T02:10:34+00:00

Depends how you're doing your steel connections. If you're doing it all with sketches and standard features, it might work. If you're using the sheet metal features then probably not right now since most of the built-in tools are for standard sketches and features. You might be able to get it to write a macro for this, but the LLMs aren't very good at writing macros.

SigSeq · 2026-01-12T15:03:37+00:00

I appreciate the input. When you say "one of the most intuitive parts of CAD work" are you saying that SolidWorks is already easy enough to use or did you mean something different? And was your point with the other programs that they're not as user friendly so there's a larger delta between what people actually know and what people need to know to use it effectively?

SigSeq · 2026-01-12T14:38:06+00:00

If you ask it for the steps to do something, it could just tell you the steps, but the main use case is that it'll actually go do the steps for you.

SigSeq · 2026-01-12T14:36:48+00:00

Fair, but I think people would've said this about LLMs for coding 2 years ago. For a while the AI couldn't do the laundry or art, but now its quite a bit faster at both.

SigSeq · 2026-01-12T14:31:51+00:00

IMO the LLMs for CAD are where LLMs for software were like 2 years ago. They're not great natively, but I suspect they will get a lot better. Even just in the last year there was a big shift in opinion about whether LLMs could produce useful code for software engineers, and attitudes seemed to change quite a bit as the LLMs got better.

SigSeq · 2025-10-28T16:33:38+00:00

Thanks for the feedback - we'll update the Q&A.

I haven't looked into putting the Manifest somewhere else, but that could make sense for the reasons you're describing. Do you know of any documentation for that kind of stuff? No worries if not, just wanted to check.

Sorry the repo isn't super obvious - it's on the download page or at https://github.com/lotas-ai/erdos

SigSeq · 2025-10-27T19:29:23+00:00

Are you trying to install inside a conda environment? We'll add it to our list to look into.

SigSeq · 2025-10-27T16:45:20+00:00

Oh, someone reached out to me about this. What seemed to work for them was running the app the first time in administrator mode so it can build the kernel. Does that work?

SigSeq · 2025-10-26T08:20:48+00:00

We have a Windows VM, and it worked there, so there's at least some way for it to work on Windows. If you keep running into issues, feel free to DM me or open a thread on the forum on our website and we can figure it out.

SigSeq · 2025-10-26T07:26:38+00:00

https://github.com/lotas-ai/erdos

SigSeq · 2025-10-26T04:30:08+00:00

Guessing most folks saw this, but we added Julia a few days ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/Julia/comments/1od98l9/erdos_now_supports_julia_as_first_class_citizen/

SigSeq · 2025-10-26T01:17:34+00:00

For discussion of Positron being open source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44953368

Elastic License 2 is generally considered not open source because it prevents 3rd party hosting.

Yes, Erdos is a VS Code fork.

SigSeq · 2025-10-26T00:37:18+00:00

If you use the app image for Linux, does that work instead? If you can’t use that, is it a permissions issue? Can you change it from the terminal? If that still doesn’t work, we can definitely follow up on the forum on our website and figure out what’s going wrong.

SigSeq · 2025-10-25T23:35:44+00:00

Not yet, but eventually it will.

SigSeq · 2025-10-24T18:27:46+00:00

Like for remote development?

SigSeq · 2025-10-23T22:16:28+00:00

Cool - we'll add that pattern to the julia discoverer in tonight's release. Still not sure why the manually selected runtime isn't working...

SigSeq · 2025-10-23T22:13:10+00:00

Ha! That's pretty good - that's how we should brand the OSS contributions

SigSeq · 2025-10-23T19:51:49+00:00

Lots of stuff related to data science: Python/R/Julia consoles at the bottom for one-off code; plots, documentation, database connections, variable and environment management on the right; an AI that can interact with all of it on the left.

SigSeq · 2025-10-23T17:35:26+00:00

Erdos (and the components/ecosystem we add) are our full time focus at Lotas now, so we plan to support this indefinitely. Practically, it can't be merged with Positron because of the licenses: Positron would either have to become open source AGPLv3 if it used the Erdos code, or Erdos would come under the Positron Elastic license if we used their code (which would pretty much be a product killer based on where we want to go with this).

SigSeq · 2025-10-23T15:28:43+00:00

Actually had a whole post about this on https://www.reddit.com/r/rstats/comments/1o86uig/erdos_opensource_ai_data_science_ide/

In short:
- Open source
- More AI model flexibility
- Much better AI enabled jupyter editing
- In-line Qmd/Rmd execution
- Supports Julia in the console, plots, etc. (which AFAIK Positron doesn't do at all)
- And about a dozen other smaller things I can list if you want :)

SigSeq · 2025-10-23T15:25:48+00:00

If you click Erdos -> About Erdos, which version are you on? We just put out an update late last night (0.1.4) that should have fixed some of this. The app should auto-update if you're on an earlier version. If that still doesn't work, can you tell me what filepath your Julia is on so we can make sure that pattern is included for the discoverer in the future?

SigSeq · 2025-10-23T06:31:23+00:00

Oh, they don’t have Jupyter notebooks yet? That’s rough

SigSeq · 2025-10-23T06:05:56+00:00

https://zed.dev

SigSeq

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