Solvaix

Testing how far AI can go in CAD, BIM and 3D

[Solvaix @Solvaix]

https://t.co/nfzgcxK9aK

[Solvaix @Solvaix]

@glade1579857 I like it!

[Solvaix @Solvaix]

I LET AN AI ARCHITECT AND AN AI ENGINEER FIGHT OVER ONE HOUSE

Two separate agents. One shared model. $28,000 for extras, and both had to sign.

The architect wants height, glass and open space. The engineer has to make the AC, ducts and hot water work inside that budget.

That's where it gets tense. A vaulted ceiling kills the attic over the great room, so the ducts have nowhere to hide. More west glass means a bigger AC. A big range hood needs makeup air by code.

Every move gets checked instantly: cooling load, duct friction, hot water wait, code, cost.

Before each line, they tested options in private. The engineer tried 169. The architect tried 27.

After 8 turns of back-and-forth, both signed.

Giving them voices and listening to them argue was the most interesting part.

[Solvaix @Solvaix]

I MADE 20 AI AGENTS FIGHT OVER ONE HOUSE

Single-story, 1,972 sq ft, attached garage.

Each agent designed the full MEP with its own strategy. Cheapest. Fastest install. Fastest hot water. Max code margin. Quietest air. 20 strategies total.

Every design had to pass code first. Then the knockouts started.

The "Cheapest" agent went out first. Hot water took 27 seconds to reach the tap.

"Max code margin" played it so safe it went $1,200 over budget. Out.

Two more drowned in clashes. 23 and 24 spots where pipes and ducts hit each other.

10 agents knocked out. 3 made the final.

The winner was the most boring strategy of all: "Balanced".

$11,215 in pipe, duct and wire. 252 hours of rough-in. Hot water in 5.6 seconds. 72 out of 72 code checks passed.

88,120 layouts checked to get there.

[Solvaix @Solvaix]

5 AI AGENTS DESIGNED THE ENTIRE MEP FOR ONE APARTMENT AT THE SAME TIME

Each had one job: drains, water, air, power and fire sprinklers.

3 bed, 2 bath, 1,560 sq ft.

They worked independently, each trying different layouts. They didn't know what the others were doing.

The drain agent tested 1,749 layouts. The sprinkler agent tested 1,729. Between all five, they went through 4,871 layouts, rejecting most of them.

Then I brought all 5 systems together in one model.

11 clashes.

A hot water pipe ran straight through an exhaust duct. A sprinkler pipe ended up inside an air duct.

So I brought in a 6th agent to fix the mess. It moved a pipe drop 2 inches below the duct, shifted another duct 10 inches to clear the sprinkler, and got rid of all 11 clashes.

There was another problem. The water agent's first design made you wait 139 seconds for hot water in the main bathroom.

I sent it back. It added a recirculation loop. Now it's 5.6 seconds.

64 code checks at the end. All passed.

[Solvaix @Solvaix]

https://t.co/nfzgcxK9aK

[Solvaix @Solvaix]

I FOUND A RANDOM HOUSE PLAN ONLINE AND ASKED CLAUDE TO DESIGN THE ENTIRE MEP SYSTEM

It was just a floor plan. Two floors, 20 rooms, 15 fixtures. No pipes, no ducts, no wiring. Just walls and doors.

I told Claude to figure out all the plumbing, HVAC and electrical systems, following US building codes.

And this is where it got interesting.

It tried 1,353 different drain layouts. 1,272 failed. Some routes took a long detour around a beam. Others put the main stack right in the middle of an open room. Some didn't leave enough room for the pipe to maintain its required slope.

Only 81 options made it through. Claude picked the best one.

Then came the water supply. The shortest pipe layout looked good on paper, until Claude calculated you'd have to wait a full minute for hot water at the far sink. So it scrapped that design and moved to a manifold next to the heater. Wait time dropped to 19 seconds.

Then it worked through the HVAC and electrical systems: 12 rooms with supply air, 77 outlets, 30 circuits and 8 smoke alarms.

When it was done, it checked its own design against 18 code requirements. All 18 passed.

Honestly, the best part is watching all the failed designs pop up in red and seeing exactly what went wrong each time.

Still, Claude is checking its own work here. A real engineer would need to review and approve everything before construction.

[Solvaix @Solvaix]

https://t.co/nfzgcxK9aK

[Solvaix @Solvaix]

78 CLASHES TO ZERO IN 6 SECONDS

Claude Opus 5.5 started with an office ceiling void where all 7 systems were laid out in 2D and found 78 clashes.

Then it rerouted all 52 runs to clear them: drainage first, ducts under the beams, pipes and cable trays last.

78 clashes → 0
50 mm clearance everywhere
468 m of runs

The scene is illustrative, but the routing calculations are real.

To try this on a real project, you can connect Claude to Revit via MCP.

[Solvaix @Solvaix]

https://t.co/nfzgcxK9aK

[Solvaix @Solvaix]

CLAUDE OPUS 5.5 DREW A LOFT HOUSE WITH A POOL AND A GARAGE IN 26.6 SECONDS. THEN IT BUILT THE HOUSE IN 3D.

The plan is drawn in a CAD interface Claude coded itself in the browser. Then the same plan turns into a 3D house.

What's inside:
2 bedrooms, bath, guest WC, closet with laundry
6.6 m loft hall with a mezzanine and a spiral stair
Garage with a tech room for the pool pump and heat pump
13.2 × 3.0 m pool, spa, deck, fire pit
271.7 m² of floor inside

184 objects in total: walls, glass, 13 doors and windows, 53 furniture and equipment blocks, 8 trees, dimensions and room tags.

It's a concept. Nobody checked it against building code.

[Solvaix @Solvaix]

SHAZAM NEVER HEARS YOUR SONG.

It hears about 95 dots.

Claude rebuilt the algorithm from Shazam's 2003 paper, right in the browser, and dropped it into a loud bar.

What happens in those 5 seconds:

1. Sound becomes a map: pitch, loudness, time.
2. Everything is thrown away except the sharpest peaks. 95 of them.
3. Peaks get paired up. Two notes plus the gap between them = one print. 817 prints.
4. Every print is looked up in a database of 300 songs. 1,471 matches, plenty of them pure chance.
5. The real trick is timing. In the right song, the matches come in the same order with the same gaps as in your clip. 185 of them lined up perfectly. The next best song had 5.

Then the bar got louder. Each round added more talking on top of the same 5 seconds.

Talking 32 times louder than the music: only 13 prints still matched, 1.8% of all of them. Shazam still named the song.

Talking 63 times louder: only 6 matched. Too few to tell from luck. Song lost.

Avery Wang's paper says the same: a match can survive with only 1 to 2% of prints left.

Every number here comes from the run itself.

Shazam has named over 100 billion songs this way.

[Solvaix @Solvaix]

CLAUDE SHOWED WHY YOUR GPS GOES CRAZY IN THE CITY

I asked Claude to show what really happens when your phone finds you. 15 minutes later, it built this scene.

Here's how it works:

• Satellites orbiting 20,000+ km above Earth keep sending signals. They reach your phone in about 0.07 seconds, so faint they're buried in background noise.
• Your phone matches each signal against a copy it already knows. How late it arrives tells the distance to that satellite.
• With distances to 4+ satellites, your phone works out where you are. It also corrects its own clock, because being off by a billionth of a second means about 30 cm of distance error.
• Under open sky, that gives you about ±4 m accuracy.

Between tall buildings, most satellites are hidden. Their signals bounce off glass and walls and arrive late, so your phone thinks you're somewhere else. In the simulation on 7th Ave in Manhattan, the dot drifts ~13 m on average, with errors reaching 22 m.

Satellite clocks tick about 38 microseconds faster per day than clocks on Earth because of Einstein's relativity. Without correction, the distances to satellites would be off by ~11 km after a single day.

It's a simulation using real GPS and Galileo orbit parameters, but the buildings are simplified.

[Solvaix @Solvaix]

CLAUDE LAUNCHED 4,800 PAPER PLANES

Every throw is simulated. Each plane is folded from a virtual A4 sheet, crease by crease, so Claude gets its actual shape and center of balance.

4 classic designs went in: Dart, Bulldog, Glider, Nakamura Lock.

64 planes per generation, 3 throws each. The top 2 survive, the rest are replaced by bred and mutated offspring. 25 generations.

The physics is based on real measurements: center of pressure from an NYU study on gliding plates (J. Fluid Mech., 2022), and drag from a wind tunnel test of a paper plane.

Gliders flipped over. Darts landed short. Nakamura Lock took over by generation 3 and reached ~22 ft with a gentle throw.

It's a 2D sim, so your real throws will vary.

[Solvaix @Solvaix]

CLAUDE OPUS 5.5 CONTROLLED THE CURSOR AND DESIGNED THIS SEWING MACHINE

No SolidWorks here. Claude first built a CAD environment that looks almost exactly like SolidWorks, right in the browser, then designed the machine inside it.

[Solvaix @Solvaix]

CLAUDE OPUS 5.5 FOUND THE PERFECT SPOT FOR THE ROUTER IN MY APARTMENT

Wi-Fi in my bedroom was basically dead. Video calls kept freezing.

So I drew a rough floor plan of my apartment by hand, took a photo, and sent it to Claude.

It recreated my entire apartment as a digital floor plan, walls and all, and assigned every material its real signal loss: concrete -18 dB, brick -12, drywall -3.5, even the fridge.

Then it checked the signal in my bedroom: -98.5 dBm. A tiled bathroom wall and two concrete walls stood between it and the router. No wonder.

Next, it deployed a swarm of 36 test points across the apartment to evaluate 1,332 possible router locations and converged on one.

Coverage went from 35% to 94%. The dead zone shrank from 669 to 38 sq ft. Bedroom signal: -98.5 → -60.8 dBm.

Then it turned the entire process into a mini scene and animated the calculations.

[Solvaix @Solvaix]

CLAUDE CUT A HOUSE IN HALF AND SHOWED THE MEP

This is still a rough version, and the visuals can definitely be improved.

But Claude built the whole thing on its own. It wrote the code, modeled the entire house, including every pipe and wire, set up the animation, and even created the sound.

Everything runs right in the browser. No external 3D software needed.

Imagine being able to explore any building like this.

Feels like this has potential for something much bigger.

[Solvaix @Solvaix]

GEMINI 4 ARGON BUILT A SPINNING REEL

No SolidWorks involved. Gemini built the entire interface right in the browser.

I gave it one task: model a spinning reel the way a real engineer would in SolidWorks, step by step, and make it actually work.

It modeled the main gears from scratch, assembled 10 parts into a working reel, and ran the simulation at 60 RPM. One turn of the handle spins the rotor 5.2 times, while the spool moves back and forth to lay the line evenly.

Looks just like SolidWorks, right?

[Solvaix @Solvaix]

3D-PRINTED HOUSE, DESIGNED BY CLAUDE

Claude Opus 5.5 designed this 2-bed, 2-bath home from scratch, then worked out how to print it using a construction-scale 3D printer.

Even the CAD program is Claude's own creation. It built the tool first, right in a browser tab, then designed the house inside it.

The walls follow the approach ICON uses to print homes in Texas: a single bead of concrete on the outside, a gap for insulation, and two beads on the inside.

It calculated the entire print:

160 layers, 3/4" each
11.3 miles of concrete bead
29 cubic yards of mix

These are Claude's own calculations based on its design. A real engineer would still need to verify them.

Would you live in a house designed by AI and built by a 3D printer? lol

[Solvaix @Solvaix]

MEP engineers might want to sit down for this one, because Claude Opus 5.5 just designed radiant floor heating for a two-story house inside a Revit clone it wrote itself.

There is no Revit here. Every panel, button and dialog is JavaScript running in a browser tab.

It started from bare floor plans, placed the spaces, ran a heat loss calc for every room and colored the plan by load.

Next it laid out 17 heating loops, 3,580 feet of pipe across both floors, and routed every feed back to the manifolds without a single crossing.

After that it did the part most installers skip. It sized the flow in each loop, found the one that sizes the pump, and finished by cutting the house open in 3D to show the pipes sitting in the floor.

People still wait weeks for a layout like this.

[Solvaix @Solvaix]

THIS ISN'T BLENDER.

It's a cable-driven robotic tentacle, modelled by Claude Opus 5.5 inside an editor it built from scratch just for this project.

I asked it for something like Blender that runs in the browser, then a robot arm built inside it. Here's what came back.

One 60 mm disc with six cable holes, arrayed into 24 vertebrae on a 3 mm spine. Six cables, three per section, each one pulled by its own motor and spool in the base.

All of it took 30 to 40 minutes. Nothing to install, just a browser tab.

Already picturing 3D students handing this in as a semester project they started the night before.

[Solvaix @Solvaix]

THIS ISN'T SOLIDWORKS. CLAUDE BUILT THE WHOLE THING IN A BROWSER.

There's no CAD program running here, no plugin and no screen capture. Claude wrote the interface, the cursor and every click as code. Then it designed a watch movement inside its own fake CAD so there would be something real to model.

Each wheel in the train comes from just tooth count and size, so changing them gives you the next one. The train runs 5,760 to 1, which is why one wheel turns exactly once a minute for the seconds hand, and the balance swings at 3 Hz like a real movement. Claude also slipped once and set the mainspring about 70 times too weak. It compared that with real Swiss specs and fixed it, then moved a post that would have hit the barrel teeth.

People still argue about whether AI can design real parts. Meanwhile it can fake the whole software and still get the watch math right.

[Solvaix @Solvaix]

YOUR BACKYARD COULD BE PAYING YOUR MORTGAGE. CLAUDE DREW THE HOUSE THAT DOES IT.

Since California legalized backyard homes, ADU permits jumped 150x and now make up almost 1 in 5 new homes there. A 1 bedroom ADU in the LA area rents for about $2,000 to $2,800 a month and costs roughly $80,000 to $120,000 to build, so it can pay for itself in around 5 years.

Claude Opus 5.5 drew one: a 20' x 20' home on a regular 50' x 125' lot. It started with the property line, placed the house 4 feet off the side and rear lines, squeezed in a parking spot and ran sewer, water and power back to the main house. Then it drew the actual home: 2x6 walls, a bedroom, a bath with laundry, a kitchen, smoke and CO alarms, every dimension in feet and inches, and a full sheet with the site plan, room schedule and notes.

It even sized the bedroom window as an emergency exit: big enough to climb out of, sill at 32" off the floor where code allows 44" max.

It's a schematic, so a real permit set still needs energy calcs (Title 24 in California), sometimes an engineer, and city plan check.

But the first draft of a backyard rental now takes a prompt, not a week.

[Solvaix @Solvaix]

MY BRAIN STILL CAN'T PROCESS THIS. AI JUST PIPED AN ENTIRE MALL OF AMERICA.

Claude Opus 5.5 took a building the size of Mall of America and did the entire MEP by itself. 504 stores, six 2,000-ton chillers, 33 miles of duct, 131 miles of pipe and 31,008 sprinkler heads spaced to NFPA 13. Storm drains, kitchen exhaust, backup generators, all of it. 111,641 elements in total, modeled in a Revit-style workspace.

Then it ran a clash check on its own work. It found 21 spots where storm pipes cut through chilled water, sprinkler and sanitary lines, rerouted them and checked again. Zero clashes.

The building is approximate and the systems are Claude's own design. No engineer has reviewed it.

Would you let AI coordinate your next project?