Show HN: Aircad – Professional drafting and 3D modeling in the browser (aircad.com)
18 points by peetle 11 hours ago
Aircad is a professional CAD system running in the browser with deep AI integration. It includes professional grade drafting and documentation tools, NURBS-based solid modeling, and a lot more. You can make professional quality design documents with it. It is all integrated behind a scripting API that can do anything you can do in the interface and also perform complex modeling operations efficiently. It reads and writes file formats like DXF, DWG, STEP, and 3DM.
I built Aircad because I was frustrated with what was out there. Current CAD tools are expensive and slow to improve. New features barely move the needle. With Aircad, you have fast, powerful geometry tools for just about anything, from conceptual models to your final design.
The newer generation of web-based CAD isn’t comprehensive enough to complete a project or is slower than existing desktop products because it sends performance-sensitive work to a server (OnShape), or isn’t designed to scale to real work in a collaborative setting (many "toy" CAD tools).
Current CAD collaboration workflows are fragile, costly, and complex. They’re file-based and separate the design artifacts (eg PDFs) from the source. Collaboration is often an expensive add-on that raises your subscription, is hard to learn, and feels unnatural. Aircad builds it in: version history, drawing comparison, forking, and realtime collaboration.
AI in most CAD tools is tacked on as a plug-in instead of being deeply integrated, and those plug-ins are often inefficient, hard to adopt, and costly. Aircad has a built-in AI agent and a comprehensive scripting API with a stage-and-commit workflow, so you know exactly what is happening during a complex change. You can use AI to write new scripts and commands that extend Aircad with repeatable, shareable workflows.
sincman an hour ago
What is the geometry kernel? That's always the first question I have.
peetle an hour ago
Thanks for asking. Core ops are OCCT. It's got great primitives and tolerant modeling. For performance purposes, I've implemented my own algorithms for hidden line rendering, tessellation, and others. I've spent my whole career (15 years+) working on and around kernels.
More detail for the curious: it’s C++ compiled to WebAssembly and runs entirely client-side with a WebGL2 renderer, so there’s no server round-trip for geometry. OCCT does booleans, fillets, and STEP. I replaced its mesher with my own tessellator because BRepMesh was the bottleneck at scale, and hidden-line/Make2D are custom too. Happy to go deeper on any of it.
bertt 4 minutes ago
Product aside, it's nice to see what seem like real answers over equivocality. Wishing you the best of luck!
bpiroman an hour ago
the landing page and copy is top quality
peetle an hour ago
Aw thanks! I spent longer than I wish to mention on this.
brudgers an hour ago
Congratulations on launching.
I would not bet a business that depends on CAD on something that only costs $19/month. Even if it didn't require taking a dependency on a website.
Or to put it AutoCad is cheaper than being sued. Good luck.
peetle an hour ago
Fair concern, and it’s the right question to ask of any new tool. A few concrete answers:
Your work isn’t trapped. Drawings export to DWG, DXF, PDF, and STEP at any time, and you can save the native file locally. If Aircad vanished tomorrow, your drawings open in AutoCAD. The engine runs in your browser, not on our servers. Modeling and drafting don’t round-trip to a server, so it’s fast and isn’t fragile the way server-side CAD is. On liability: the professional of record carries it whatever the tool. AutoCAD’s license disclaims it too. What a firm needs from software is accuracy, standard formats, and an exit path, and that last one is why DWG round-tripping got so much of my time.
The price is low because a small team building on modern infrastructure has much lower costs, not because corners were cut.
yodon 16 minutes ago
As a related note, reading lots of "I built" here is not confidence inspiring, no matter how good you are. There's always that bus factor thing.