[−]the__alchemist · 2026-10-10 Sat 18:38 UTC ·
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Concur. It's worth explaining this, as someone new to CAD would get the impression the various tools in CAD are on even ground, and may assume "I know programming, so OpenSCAD sounds like the right choice". I would love some day for programmatic and/or free/cheap CAD to be competitive, but we're not there. Solidworks, Fusion, Inventor etc still outclass FreeCAD, which outclasses OpenSCAD.
I agree with your ordering of the various programs out there but FreeCAD 26.3 is now available as a release candidate with a wonderful collection of improvements. I'd think for many people, FreeCAD is now "good enough" for a lot of things. I'm building a virtual pinball cabinet and the whole thing is modeled in FreeCAD.
The mcp integration may be seen as both a blessing and a curse but tbh, it’s very interesting :) and hopefully as folks post and comment on more models that are generated with it, we can get a better training set.
I actually still use the freecad gui because it’s cheaper but I can totally see how someone new might just wanna use the MCP.
Mango Jelly's overview of some of the biggest new features: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdTyFHY-5r4
I actually still use the freecad gui because it’s cheaper but I can totally see how someone new might just wanna use the MCP.
I tried to follow along w/ a book which was purportedly for 1.1, but it turned out to actually cover 1.0