The launch graphic says "Ported end-to-end by Fable, an AI agent" and it definitely feels that way. Buggy, glitchy, needs some love and human eyes before it's really usable.
FreeCAD on desktop is much the same in my experience. If LLMs were mainstream a few years ago I would have assumed the UI was 100% AI generated with zero human input besides a oneshot prompt.
Onshape is free in the browser as long as you are not doing commercial work. It’s a professional system from the founders of Solidworks that competes with all the top CAD tools.
> It’s a professional system from the founders of Solidworks that competes with all the top CAD tools.
Because it's built on Parasolid, the same geometric kernel as everyone else. With ACIS pretty much out the door, almost all the professional CAD packages are just window dressing on the same CG implementation.
Agreed. I’m not OP but for six months I’ve been using Claude to build a from-scratch CAD kernel based on Rust and WASM, MIT licensed.
The actual UI still needs a lot of work, but I’ve been focused on the kernel. Fable has helped a lot though Opus was already making great headway.
I’m an OnShape power user going back about ten years, Solidworks before that. I need a CAD system that absolutely works. There is a lot of work to do still, and it still seems impossible to succeed, but I’ve been very happy with where things have been going with it lately.
It’s serverless, local, and browser based. You can load the latest binary from GitHub pages here:
The app consists of a wasm (web assembly) binary and JavaScript. The wasm runs locally on your machine in your browser and communicates with the JavaScript frontend. There is no backend server to handle any part of the program. The URL just loads the binary in to your local browser. I don’t know exactly how one would set this up but this would work for example fully offline. The browser basically just becomes a universal compute and rendering engine for it.
Browser can be local. What’s nice about browser based is that browser based programs can run on every device. Though it sounds like this one requires chrome which seems weird to me.
Because then it doesn't matter what you're running locally, as long as you've got a supported browser (Chrome, I'm guessing). It means it doesn't have to make a difference if you have a Window 10 desktop or a MacBook Air or a Chromebook. Go to the web page and look at this CAD.
The launch graphic says "Ported end-to-end by Fable, an AI agent" and it definitely feels that way. Buggy, glitchy, needs some love and human eyes before it's really usable.
FreeCAD on desktop is much the same in my experience. If LLMs were mainstream a few years ago I would have assumed the UI was 100% AI generated with zero human input besides a oneshot prompt.
If Solidworks and Onshape were born after the birth of LLMs, they'd probably be glitchy as hell.
Recent and related:
LibreCAD in the Browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48755075 - July 2026 (17 comments)
Onshape is free in the browser as long as you are not doing commercial work. It’s a professional system from the founders of Solidworks that competes with all the top CAD tools.
> It’s a professional system from the founders of Solidworks that competes with all the top CAD tools.
Because it's built on Parasolid, the same geometric kernel as everyone else. With ACIS pretty much out the door, almost all the professional CAD packages are just window dressing on the same CG implementation.
Agreed. I’m not OP but for six months I’ve been using Claude to build a from-scratch CAD kernel based on Rust and WASM, MIT licensed.
The actual UI still needs a lot of work, but I’ve been focused on the kernel. Fable has helped a lot though Opus was already making great headway.
I’m an OnShape power user going back about ten years, Solidworks before that. I need a CAD system that absolutely works. There is a lot of work to do still, and it still seems impossible to succeed, but I’ve been very happy with where things have been going with it lately.
It’s serverless, local, and browser based. You can load the latest binary from GitHub pages here:
https://sequoia-hope.github.io/waffle-iron/
Click the Assay menu to see the kernel test cases we’ve been using so far. Rapidly closing on 100% support!
How long have you been building this?
> It’s serverless, local, and browser based.
uhh what..
The app consists of a wasm (web assembly) binary and JavaScript. The wasm runs locally on your machine in your browser and communicates with the JavaScript frontend. There is no backend server to handle any part of the program. The URL just loads the binary in to your local browser. I don’t know exactly how one would set this up but this would work for example fully offline. The browser basically just becomes a universal compute and rendering engine for it.
Sounds cool. Doesn't work.
Seems it's only supporting Chrome at the moment.
Amazing. How much did it cost?
Why would I want to run this in the browser vs locally?
Browser can be local. What’s nice about browser based is that browser based programs can run on every device. Though it sounds like this one requires chrome which seems weird to me.
Probably nice to have for those with low income that only have a Chromebook.
Because then it doesn't matter what you're running locally, as long as you've got a supported browser (Chrome, I'm guessing). It means it doesn't have to make a difference if you have a Window 10 desktop or a MacBook Air or a Chromebook. Go to the web page and look at this CAD.
This. The browser as a universal platform.
Like electron, but it's fine this way for some reason.