Claude has helped me with brainstorming, but I do all the CAD and optimization.
Would be cool if, in 10 years, the prompt to prototype pipeline was as simple, quick, and effective as this landing page alludes to.
1. A frontier model wrapper that gens the designs 2. A bunch of humans behind the scenes ("AI means Another Indian") actually reviewing and fixing the design.
That is, get to market quickly with people, gather lots of data, and hope that models can be refined eventually so less/no human review is needed.
I recently worked with Claude Opus 5 High to help me build a testing rig for some acoustic tests. There was a lot of back and forth with each time Claude giving me the stereotypical "Great catch! I see my mistake in the previous iteration..." responses.
One thing AI does well is allow businesses a much longer delay before realizing that designers’ real value is figuring out what things should look like to solve specific business problems. To CEOs/founders/presidents: The logo isn’t for you— it’s for your customers. Your personal taste and preconceptions should have no part in the process. Anybody with a few years in Illustrator could make any asset you needed. Just because you can make a neato looking logo with your chatbot of choice, doesn’t mean it’s an appropriate logo, and there are people who work for a pretty modest salary that can explain exactly why.
For background I've been into 3d printing since 2013, my first printer was an acrylic i3 clone with a RAMPS controller running Marlin. I've built 3 printers over the years and use my current one pretty regularly. I've been a 3d printing evangelist for years.
That said, going to any sort of craft fair or places like Etsy, and low effort 3d printed garbage is really getting annoying. I was at my small, local renfaire earlier this summer and 1/4 of the booths were just selling 3d printed and laser cut stuff, most of which were designs that are easily found online. I've seen this kind of stuff taking over at other similar spaces, and have seen people complaining about it for a year or so. It would maybe not be so much of a problem if people were making their own designs, but when it's just a model off of printables with at best some minor tweaks made by an AI tool, I have trouble getting excited.
For reference, of the 10 vendors I actually talked to who were selling these kinds of things, none had made any models themselves or were even familiar with blender, tinkercad, or any other modeling tools. There were 3d printed 'ale steins' that had had text embossed onto them, or plywood tchotkes with AI art lasered onto them. Annoying, since anyone who has done even a basic Google search should be well aware that 3d printing, especially FDM, is a terrible process for something like a drinking glass, that will be bacteria heaven and impossible to properly clean without very specific post-processing.
So while I can't say this is why the parent poster was annoyed, this is one of the reasons someone would be annoyed with 3d printing. If I'm browsing at a renfaire, I'm looking for a handmade thing to add to my costume or home decor. The last thing I want to see in that type of environment is a Ai-generated image of a dragon burned onto a cheap set of bamboo coasters bought off of alibaba. I've seen videos and posts onli3of people expressing similar annoyances, but the have been crafting, sewing, and similar creators so probably outside the general HN zeitgeist.