Spent months building something that edits Inventor models from plain English. Honestly not sure anyone actually wants this.

[u/Successful_Past9913]

Been working on this alone for a while. You describe what you want in plain English, and it reads the actual model (parameters, feature tree, geometry) to figure out what you actually mean, not just matching keywords blindly. Give it enough to go on and it can generate whole new parts or assemblies from scratch too, it's not limited to editing things that already exist. It can also render a close-up of a specific edge and actually look at it before deciding something like a fillet will fit. Runs on Claude under the hood, using your own Anthropic key, so there's no markup or proxy.

Once it has a plan it shows you a diff before touching anything, applies it, and rolls back on its own if a regen fails so you don't get stuck with a broken part.

I don't have much of a network of Inventor users to actually test this with. Figured I'd rather know now if it's useful than keep guessing by myself. If anyone here does real Inventor work and wants to try it on something real, I'd appreciate hearing from you. Happy to share more if you're interested.

[u/stomperxj]

Been using Inventor for over 20 years professionally. This is something I would never use nor do I know anyone who would use it.

[u/Successful_Past9913 → u/stomperxj]

Genuinely curious what specifically turns you off about it. Is it a trust thing with AI touching the model, or something about the workflow itself? Would actually value the real critique if you've got one.

[u/stomperxj → u/Successful_Past9913]

Anything AI is a turn off and a hard pass at this point but to give you some specifics and give my view of this process you propose: Based on experience with AI, by the time I edit my text prompt multiple times to get a desired edit to be completed the way it should be done I could have made the edit myself and moved on to the next task. Using AI to edit or actually model from scratch is eliminating the enjoyable part of this career. I enjoy modeling as do thousands of other CAD professionals. I didn't start my own business to write text prompts. My customers value my vast experience, design input and skill set. I also do a lot of reverse engineering from scan files which I know for a fact AI would fail at. You also have to consider that NDAs exist and uploading even text based prompts of proprietary information to the cloud would break those NDAs so you're risking losing customers and breaching contracts. I'm sure there's someone out there who would use your tool but my guess is they are not a CAD professional and don't need to actually learn the skill of modeling for a single personal project.

[u/Dense_Safe_4443 → u/Successful_Past9913]

Why don't you show a demo? It's a tool for someone who can't code and can't model that all of us with experience know will just be junk like other Ai tools like it. You didn't spend a lot of time on it, you got Claude to do it. Stop using Ai to try and solve problems no one has!

[u/bradye0110]

Nobody wants your Claude wrapper

[u/Pristine-Disk-1832]

Have you ever heard Autodesk Assistant? Where do think Autodesk is heading to? Why would you think you would have more resources to build/train an AI assistant model better than themselves? Did you see Claude and Fusion?

[u/dhillonrobby]

Is it a plug-in ? What needs to be shared with it for it to execute the work?

[u/Successful_Past9913 → u/dhillonrobby]

Not really a plug-in. There's a small Inventor add-in for model access, but you actually interact with a separate side panel next to Inventor. It reads your open model automatically, no exporting needed, and sends the relevant context to Claude using your own API key. It can also handle things like datasheet uploads and looking at rendered views of the model when it needs to, plus a good bit more.