A hobby project just quietly tackled a problem the big CAD vendors haven't: letting an AI agent actually drive your 3D model instead of just talking about it.
SolidCraft is a new open-source parametric CAD application built in Rust. It supports the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the open standard for connecting AI models to external tools and data. That means an AI agent could, in principle, issue commands to create or edit parametric shapes inside SolidCraft instead of requiring a human to click through menus and feature trees. The project is early-stage, with modest traction so far and little public discussion yet.
Parametric CAD has long been the territory of expensive, proprietary platforms like Fusion 360, SolidWorks, and Onshape, with open-source options such as FreeCAD serving hobbyists who can't or won't pay. Building a new one from scratch in Rust, and wiring it for AI-agent control from the start, is a bet that the next CAD interface looks less like a mouse and a toolbar and more like a chat prompt and an API call.
Whether that bet pays off depends on whether an AI can actually reason about geometry constraints and tolerances, not just issue commands that happen to parse.