Pierre ☕️

Engineer at @zoodotdev. Computationally curious.

[Pierre ☕️ @PierreJacquier]

RT @zoodotdev: Zoo Design Studio just got a major upgrade, constraint-driven sketching! 🎉

While AI has been one of our biggest differentia…

[Zoo @zoodotdev]

Big news: We’re launching a virtual Zoo Design Studio Makeathon and registration is open! 🎉

Any industry, any problem, any idea worth sharing. If you’ve got a CAD model idea you’ve been wanting to make, this is your moment!

Register here → https://t.co/u1PiIL1evk

[Steve Friedl @SJFriedl]

A shout-out to the awesome peeps at @zoodotdev, for the remarkable AI agent for CAD.

I started noodling around with Zoo's 1.0 release last year, mainly because I was intrigued by their models-as-code paradigm.

Zoo supports the usual GUI layout, but internally it's all code (KCL) that round-trips through the GUI; you can absolutely create models strictly from code - this appeals to me the software guy.

At the time I made a moderately deep dive into it, gave some feedback, but it wasn't really even close to supplanting Fusion 360 for me so I mostly left Zoo on the back burner.

At the time I did not really look at the AI components because I was skeptical for no good reason even though I'm a massive fan of ChatGPT.

With this release they have Zookeeper, a conversational CAD agent, and it's incredibly impressive and tells me that Zoo can fill a use case for me now: parameterized designs.

I'm designing a small electronic circuit board in @DipTrace, and I can add 3D models to the parts so I can visualize what the final board looks like.

For this discussion I'm mainly referring to the board-mounted JST-XH connectors: there's a five-pin connector in the upper right that uses a model I found somewhere, but haven't yet set up the 3- and 4-pin versions shown on the left:

There are something like six dozen variants of this connector (through-hole vs SMD, top entry vs side entry, with bosses or not, etc.), and this is where I thought: I'll try the AI agent and knock out the ones I need.

It's remarkable.

My first prompt was incomplete, of course, because I haven't refined my skills at this yet, but we had a real conversation, and I really liked that it was telling me what it was thinking about.

The thing that really got my attention: it knows this is an electrical connector that mounts on a printed circuit board, not just a raw set of X/Y/Z dimensions in CAD.

After a few go-rounds, it created a proper 3-pin variant, and it knew that the pins should be brass-colored because they are metal, as well as asking me about the polarity keying features because JST-XH connectors have those: this is domain awareness, and this was the big deal for me.

And when I go to the code editor window, I just change a 3 to a 4, and *poof* now I have the four-pin variant:

The generated KCL is entirely readable and looks as if I might have written it by hand.

We've all seen code generators with unreadable variable names from a random-number generator (__u_000_13a), but Zookeeper synthesized truly meaningful names and comments - none of these came from me:

It's remarkable.

It did take a bit of reasoning for it to get this far, and I believe I could have knocked out the three-pin version in Fusion faster than in Zoo, though not by much.

But where Zoo shines is the parameterization to generate the whole range of models from 2 pins to 24 pins: this is slam-dunk faster, keep my design in source code, and ensure that they are all internally consistent.

Fusion does come with an add-on for doing full parameterized designs, but it's much more expensive than the base product: yah no.

It also helps that these models are strictly for visualization, I'm not actually fabricating anything so I don't have to get a lot of fine details right, but my Zoo chops will only get better.

I believe they are currently focusing on enterprise implementations, where they will train on a corpus of existing models, and this probably means you can ask: "Create a new part that bolts onto assembly EP-1023 at the lower flange" (or whatever) and it will have some idea what you're talking about.

I've run into a few bumps in the road: the UI did freeze on me, and the exported STEP files don't render in DipTrace (yet), but these are all things that can get sorted out.

I'm excited for the team at Zoo, especially @jessfraz , @jordannoone, @Jenna_Bryant and @adam_chal who I interact with here on Twitter, plus the rest of the animals.

Good work!

[Jessie Frazelle @jessfraz]

The in-app agent is great for modifying your parts, researching, and knowing if the part can be manufactured, or give tips on DFM

[Jordan Noone 🇺🇸 @jordannoone]

The latest release from @zoodotdev, the only AI built into a CAD environment.

Many are still proposing or attempting to develop plugins that are disjointed, lack full context, and/or result in models that can't be edited with traditional CAD.

Zookeeper edits the same feature tree, can reach beyond to external environments, and has full access into your designs for reasoning context.

Lots more on the horizon as we advance further with our AI and allow Zookeeper access to downstream engineering as well.

Most of our recent work has been for custom deployments for enterprises, fine-tuning on their data, and integrating Zookeeper via GUI or via API into their environments.

These fine-tuned implementations have orders of magnitude more data and have resulted in multi-million dollar contracts with some of the world's most advanced engineering companies.

Learn more at https://t.co/u4AncpLv58.

[Zoo @zoodotdev]

Meet Zookeeper, our conversational CAD agent. ✨

[Pierre ☕️ @PierreJacquier]

@SamStrongTalks @jessfraz Thank you! Would love to help debug this.

[Adam Chalmers @adam_chal]

I'm very excited to be talking at
@rustforgeconf in NZ this August! I'll be telling the story of how @zoodotdev built our CAD app in Rust, and why that was a good idea for our little startup. Check out the lineup at https://t.co/s1hefLIkdd

[Pierre ☕️ @PierreJacquier]

@jessfraz I’m glad my forehead made it to upper management circles

[Pierre ☕️ @PierreJacquier]

Been a crazy 2y 🎉

[Jessie Frazelle @jessfraz]

After two years, fewer than 30 engineers, and a fraction of the capital poured into earlier efforts, we are officially launching v1 of Zoo Design Studio, this includes our own CAD application, CAD kernel, AND ML model! Please give us feedback!

https://t.co/IEtN3fqkOD

[Zoo @zoodotdev]

We're thrilled to announce v1.0 of Zoo Design Studio is officially released! Get the full power of a professional CAD platform, enhanced with ML through Text-to-CAD.

🎉 Start using Zoo Design Studio now for free → https://t.co/7EpYICnrpV

Read @jessfraz’s blog post on the why, the how, and what you can expect on day one. (Spoiler: we wrote our own Geometry Engine, programming language, ML model, and CAD GUI)

🔗 https://t.co/VY4ZPvcPDU

[Jessie Frazelle @jessfraz]

.@zoodotdev Modeling App v0.18.0 is out! Lots of improvements, it will only get better ;) give us feedback!
https://t.co/KYxnhlEnC8

[Pierre ☕️ @PierreJacquier]

@0xgaut Next thing you know they start a croissanterie

[Pierre ☕️ @PierreJacquier]

@tribbloid Of course! You can try the modeling app at https://t.co/AUMdcOA9Ao, which lacks any type of file support but should still be fun to play with

[Pierre ☕️ @PierreJacquier]

@tribbloid @tribbloid sorry the Linux releases are built and uploaded but currently unsupported, mostly due to this major issue with webrtc https://t.co/vcC5h814un

(in your case you seem to hit another issue before that indeed!)

[Zoo @zoodotdev]

We're thrilled to make not just one, but TWO major announcements today!

🎉 We've changed our company name to Zoo, preserving the KittyCAD name for our flagship Design API product. Explore Zoo → https://t.co/dR39BpSNQ0

🎉 We've launched Text-to-CAD, a prompt interface for generating CAD files through text prompts. Start designing → https://t.co/ds0TR8YkZ7

@jessfraz & @theJordanNoone dive deeper into these announcements on our blog, so give them a read at the links below... and join us as we celebrate such a huge day for our team! 🥳🤓

🔗 Introducing: Zoo https://t.co/RmOmchccCH
🔗 Introducing: Text-to-CAD https://t.co/eh4U3P06Aa

[Jessie Frazelle @jessfraz]

Very excited for the @zoodotdev rebrand and launching text-to-cad! Try it out in our discord https://t.co/YjoxxndhkW or online https://t.co/NNsOlmfj7C! More information here: https://t.co/R5LYCa6YpH

[Kenneth Cassel @KennethCassel]

Zoo launched a cool text to cad tool

[Kurt 🍩 @IrevDev]

It's really nice seeing things come together.

For example:
Making a change with UI.
It creates a meaningful diff for a PR.
GH actions run to reproduce CAD artifacts, like the updated geometry file and a snapshot.

Example PR here
https://t.co/3loIFN2Kiz

[Pierre ☕️ @PierreJacquier]

@theJordanNoone @theJordanNoone SolidWorks and `Option Base 1`, dream setup https://t.co/jfP19vMsqp