text-to-cad: Your Coding Agent Can Now Order You a Machined Part
Coding agents write software because software is text. Mechanical parts are not text, unless you describe them in code. That is the trick behind text-to-cad, an MIT-licensed plugin that picked up 456 stars on GitHub Trending today and sits at 17,400 total, five months after it was created.
It gives an agent a local workflow for producing real 3D models: STEP, GLB, STL and 3MF files. Under the hood the agent writes Python against build123d, which drives Open CASCADE, the same geometry kernel family that serious CAD tools use. The output is exact solid geometry, the kind a machine shop accepts. Mesh-only output from image-style generators doesn't meet that bar.
The parts that make it more than a demo come after the model exists. The plugin runs design-for-manufacturing checks, generates engineering drawings, and connects to 3D printing, sheet metal and CNC fabrication services. A local viewer shows the model next to the agent's thread. It installs as a plugin or through the skills framework and works with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini and Grok. The recommended install method is to paste the repo URL to your agent and let it do the setup.
It is also moving fast. v0.7.14 landed on Monday, the second release of the day, and the issue numbers are past 550.
The reason to care goes beyond CAD. Any domain with a code representation and a checker can be handed to a coding agent, and hardware has both: a parametric script and a manufacturability check. Describe a bracket, have the agent verify it can be milled, send it to a fab service. Each step existed before. Having them in one agent loop, on your own laptop, is new. The loop still ends with a human paying the invoice, and that is probably the right place for the human.
Link: github.com/earthtojake/text-to-cad
Docs: texttocad.dev
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It gives an agent a local workflow for producing real 3D models: STEP, GLB, STL and 3MF files. Under the hood the agent writes Python against build123d, which drives Open CASCADE, the same geometry kernel family that serious CAD tools use. The output is exact solid geometry, the kind a machine shop accepts. Mesh-only output from image-style generators doesn't meet that bar.
The parts that make it more than a demo come after the model exists. The plugin runs design-for-manufacturing checks, generates engineering drawings, and connects to 3D printing, sheet metal and CNC fabrication services. A local viewer shows the model next to the agent's thread. It installs as a plugin or through the skills framework and works with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini and Grok. The recommended install method is to paste the repo URL to your agent and let it do the setup.
It is also moving fast. v0.7.14 landed on Monday, the second release of the day, and the issue numbers are past 550.
The reason to care goes beyond CAD. Any domain with a code representation and a checker can be handed to a coding agent, and hardware has both: a parametric script and a manufacturability check. Describe a bracket, have the agent verify it can be milled, send it to a fab service. Each step existed before. Having them in one agent loop, on your own laptop, is new. The loop still ends with a human paying the invoice, and that is probably the right place for the human.
Link: github.com/earthtojake/text-to-cad
Docs: texttocad.dev
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