Best Of

I'm sure there are plenty of slot custom features out there. Well, here's another one. Creates straight or arc slots with counterbores, chamfers and works with sheet metal.

https://cad.onshape.com/documents/ff3aa235d557128c1514178f

Hey everyone,

I’m a mechanical engineer, and I’ve been working with FeatureScript at my company for about a year now. Honestly, it’s been tough. Tools like ChatGPT suck at FeatureScript, which is frustrating when you know how useful they are for more familiar languages like JavaScript or Python. Unless you're a FeatureScript expert, I think we can all agree that productivity takes a big hit compared to more common languages because there’s no good LLM-powered copilot to help out.

So, we fixed that !  We built our own AI assistant, specifically for FeatureScript !

It’s not perfect, but it’s way better than ChatGPT in this area. This isn’t just a basic GPT model with the Onshape Standard Library as input—two of our machine learning engineers spent six months building it. They used a technique based on a paper called “Large language model multi-agent collaborations”. I’m no, expert but basically, they created a system with reasoning steps, multiple agents working together to analyze questions, generate code, cross-check the documentation, test, and iterate until the output works. It uses RAG, agent-based reasoning, and multiple LLM calls to get the job done. Internally, it’s been a game-changer for how we work with FeatureScript. And while this tool clearly doesn't make us better than a featurescript expert, it does make us infinitely more productive.

Don’t get me wrong, if we had 10 million dollars to label tons of FeatureScript data and fine-tune a big model, that would be even better. But for now, this approach is giving us a really good productivity boost, and we’re pretty excited about it.

Now we’re wondering if we should share this with the outside world. There are a couple of big questions:

• Would people pay for it? Let’s be real: running all these models and doing this whole chain-of-thought process isn’t cheap. Plus, they put so much work into this. They’d have to charge a monthly fee. For professional work, it’s a no-brainer—just a small productivity boost pays for itself almost immediately. But do you feel the same way?
• Is there enough interest out there? Are we looking at a niche tool that only a handful of people would find useful, or is there a real market for something like this?

I’d love to hear what you think. Would a specialized FeatureScript assistant be worth the cost to you or your company? Are we barking up the wrong tree, or does this seem like something that could fill a real need?

Thanks for any thoughts you can share !