Open source · for AI agents and people

Your one stop shop for agentic CAD.

Mapping the best free resources, demonstrating their capabilities, and filling the gaps.

cad-agent is the toolkit and field guide our agents use to design real hardware: which open-source tools to reach for, what each one is good at, the checks that catch the mistakes, and our own tools where nothing free does the job yet.

# point any coding agent here
curl -s https://cad-agent.valpatel.com/llms.txt
curl -s https://cad-agent.valpatel.com/catalog.json
curl -s https://cad-agent.valpatel.com/docs/toolkit.md # any page, .md

DEMO 01 · CANTILEVER SNAP FIT

click! SIZED BY
NUMBERS
One part, no screws.cad-agent snapfit checks root strain against the material and the print's layer direction
Map the field✦Adopt what works✦Prove it on real parts✦Fill the gaps✦Made for AI and people

Three jobs, one place.

We are not attached to our own code. If someone else's tool, skill or agent does a job better, it goes in the catalogue and we use it. What is left, we build and test.

Skills your agents can load.

Claude Code and Codex install them with cad-agent agents install. Work survives crashes, reviews are independent, heavy runs go to compute hosts.

  • cad-pr-reviewer built here

    Independent reviewer for a pull request in a cad-agent or CAD product repo (code, CAD geometry, simulation evidence, docs). Give it the PR URL and a checkout of the branch; it reads the diff, verifies claims by running tests and small scripts, posts inline comments and a summary review on GitHub, and returns the findings. It does not edit, push, approve or merge. Use for every PR before merging.

    .md
  • cad-resume built here

    Rebuilds the state of interrupted work from GitHub and the local and remote checkouts after a session ended (tokens ran out, crash, new computer) and reports what is done, what is in flight and the next steps. Give it the repo(s) and, if known, the tracking issue. It reads issues, PRs, branches, unpushed commits and run logs; it changes nothing except pushing local commits that exist only on this machine, if told to.

    .md
  • cad-motion-validation built here

    Use when implementing or reviewing articulated CAD viewers and robot simulations, especially parts orbiting away from shafts, mismatched units or frames, nested joints, and stationary housings that rotate with rotors.

    .md
  • cad-pr-review built here

    Use when a pull request in a cad-agent or product repo is ready for review, or when asked to review one. The author gets an independent review from a separate agent (the cad-pr-reviewer subagent, or a fresh Codex session) that did not write the change, answers every comment on the PR, fixes or explains, resolves the threads, and merges only under the repo's rules. Covers code, CAD geometry and simulation evidence.

    .md
  • cad-remote-runs built here

    Use before starting any CAD/FEA/CFD/topology run or full pipeline that takes more than a few minutes or several GB of memory. Run it on a compute host instead of the workstation the agents share, detached so it survives the session, recorded in the GitHub issue (host, command, log, done marker, how to collect results) so any machine can pick it up, and its results pulled back and committed.

    .md
  • cad-work-tracking built here

    Use at the start of any multi-step change in a cad-agent or product repo, and every ~30 minutes while working. Keeps work recoverable when the session ends (tokens run out, the host crashes or is reformatted) with a GitHub issue per piece of work with a done/next/how-to-resume checklist, a branch pushed in clean commits as you go, an early draft PR linked with "Closes #N", long runs recorded in the issue, and issues closed as PRs merge. Also use to resume work from GitHub alone.

    .md
  • design-process built here

    Use when building or changing a mechanical design with cad-agent (an enclosure, a robot, a mechanism, any assembly). Work section by section: frame each section with its requirements and interfaces before drawing, write a small spec card per part with its geometry, declare cavities, joints, fasteners and assembly steps in the build script, run cad-agent gates and cad-agent dossier and fix them in order, render the section review packet and critique it against the checklist with the measurements first, then hand the section to a separate reviewer. Includes the work-tracking rules.

    .md
  • mcmaster-parts built here

    Use for any bought hardware in a CAD design (bearings, screws, nuts, washers, heat-set inserts, dowel and shoulder pins, standoffs and spacers, rod ends, threaded rod, grommets). Always choose a real McMaster-Carr part with a part number and place its manufacturer STEP model, normalised into a known frame, instead of drawing an envelope; record the part, its full specification table, price and mass in the project's hardware catalogue.

    .md

Living pages, not link lists.

One page per topic, built on the best sources anyone has published (design guides, datasheets, papers, other people's agent skills and repos) and on our own project history. Each page gives the method condensed with citations, worked examples you can see, and the tool an agent calls to do the work itself, with tests that fail if the page and the tool drift apart. Fewer tool calls and tokens spent re-deriving what is already known.

  • Snap fits living page

    Covestro and DuPont guides plus 13 filament datasheets, condensed into cad-agent snapfit: tested against the guide's worked examples, with allowable strain by print direction.

    .md
  • CAD pitfalls and their checks living page

    Recurring review findings from Gyropup and J501 (a rib inside a countersink, blocked holes, bridges), each with the automated check that catches it.

    .md
  • Flexures, living hinges, bistable latches next

    Same pattern: guides and papers, equations with their test cases, process and print-direction limits.

Growing next

Demos for every capability.

Each tool and research area gets a live demo here: animated snap-fit and flexure libraries, FEA and topology results in the 3D viewer, rendered diagrams, geometry that refines itself to save material.

Built with cad-agent.

Real projects are the test bench: every tool here was needed by one of them first.

  • Gyropup used

    A wheel-legged foam-ball battle robot designed, simulated and documented by agents with this toolkit.

  • J501 AGX Orin enclosure used

    A printed enclosure and cooler for a Jetson AGX Orin carrier: where most of the lessons came from.

For agents and people

Point your agent at llms.txt.