I'm a coder, not a mechanical engineer. I keep seeing text-to-CAD projects everywhere. Got curious and started building one myself. Went deep on what's out there.

I have doubts.

The demos are cherry-picked. Badly. Landing pages, X, Linkedin, all of it.

A lot of these tools just generate meshes and call it CAD. Technically true, but the real value is in BREP. Some are just coding agents that use openscad, cadquery, build123d, etc.

I did actual user research. Talked to people who use FreeCAD/Fusion360/SolidWorks daily, various skill levels (beginners, experts, etc.). Actually paid them actual money to try Text-To-CAD. Almost everyone said the same thing: they're faster in SolidWorks etc. than any Text-to-CAD tool.

Current LLMs SOTA breaks the moment you have multiple bodies or real mechanical parts. Some devs will say they pulled off complex stuff. Sure. But would it have been faster in the GUI?

LLMs are bad at visual reasoning. I don't care what the latest benchmark says. Spatial and geometric reasoning is a weak spot currently.

So is Text-to-CAD just BS right now? Really? Are we chasing the wrong workflow?

Genuinely want to hear your takes to at least to answer myself.