Automatic feature recognition (AFR) is essential for transforming design knowledge into actionable manufacturing information. Traditional AFR methods, which rely on predefined geometric rules and large datasets, are often time-consuming and lack generalizability across various manufacturing features. To address these challenges, this study investigates vision-language models (VLMs) for automating the recognition of a wide range of manufacturing features in CAD designs without the need for extensive training datasets or predefined rules. Instead, prompt engineering techniques, such as multi-view query images, few-shot learning, sequential reasoning, and chain-of-thought, are applied to enable recognition. The approach is evaluated on a newly developed CAD dataset containing designs of varying complexity relevant to machining, additive manufacturing, sheet metal forming, molding, and casting. Five VLMs, including three closed-source models (GPT-4o, Claude-3.5-Sonnet, and Claude-3.0-Opus) and two open-source models (LLava and MiniCPM), are evaluated on this dataset with ground truth features labelled by experts. Key metrics include feature quantity accuracy, feature name matching accuracy, hallucination rate, and mean absolute error (MAE). Results show that Claude-3.5-Sonnet achieves the highest feature quantity accuracy (74%) and name-matching accuracy (75%) with the lowest MAE (3.2), while GPT-4o records the lowest hallucination rate (8%). In contrast, open-source models have higher hallucination rates (>30%) and lower accuracies (<40%). This study demonstrates the potential of VLMs to automate feature recognition in CAD designs within diverse manufacturing scenarios.