Show HN: Camfer – An AI CAD Copilot
camfer.devHi, my name’s Arya! I’m a software engineer who loves to CAD and design cool things.
Keaton, Roth, Clark, and myself have been building https://camfer.dev for the last year. We’re excited to show v0 of camfer - a tool that lets you use AI with your favorite CAD platforms.
The camfer desktop app connects to Solidworks as a smart sidebar. Like Cursor for CAD. The tool takes in your CAD environment (open part + selections) and either answers questions or follows your instructions to create/edit designs natively in Solidworks.
Download link: https://camfer.dev/download.
Demo using camfer to make a raspberry pi case: https://youtu.be/jI4HjHu4fdI.
Problems we’ve tackled:
- Have generations be feature rich and work natively in Solidworks
- Make CAD interpretable to frontier models. GPT-5 knows a lot of things that can help me while CADing, but until now had no way of getting context for what I’m working on
- Train a fast design intent -> native generation model (lots of improvements to do here)
We’ve worked really hard to build v0, and would love for anyone in the community to try it and give feedback. You can use it for free today! In the future, we’ll introduce a freemium model with a monthly subscription after a certain number of generations.
Things I’ve personally found it useful for:
- Quickly doing first passes for single part design
- Making plates for mounting things I don’t remember the dimensions for (like a mini CIM motor)
- Iteratively designing something where I didn’t know exactly what the final form would be
- Getting advice on best design practices (e.g. “should I fillet or chamfer these edges for better manufacturability”)
To join our community:
- Join our discord: https://discord.com/invite/as8acby3
- Shoot me an email: arya@camfer.dev