Blog/2026-04-24/Modeling Better With Claude

The thing that Claude originally came up with. Julie would not let me put this on the wall

A while ago I wrote about Modeling With Claude and the method I described there does work pretty well. All you have to do is equip Claude Code with OpenSCAD and Python and ask it to make the thing you want into an STL.

The thing it came up with when I asked for it to be more angular

The problem, of course, is that Claude Code tries to write raw STLs when it can but those are very low-level, like manually tracing paths in SVGs. I thought it was much more meaningful to use higher-level primitives, and that's how I found OpenSCAD. However, it turns out that even OpenSCAD's primitives are still pretty low-level and the kernel is still pretty specific. You don't just say "chamfer this" and so on.

So the new thing I've tried is the Python `build123d` which is the successor to CADQuery, and it's honestly pretty damned good. Claude Code, equipped with an auto-review system, can generate useful models that have multiple parts to the geometry and so on. It can do smooth and angular things and is generally quite useful for this purpose, as you can see.

Here's the gist but you should know that this is entirely vibe-coded. I did not look at the source so much as at the finished model.