I was out of work for a month with a hip injury. I owned a 3D printer but couldn't use CAD like Fusion 360. I have ADHD and their way of teaching was fundamentally impossible for me. Sitting there watching YouTube videos or reading a bright white screen just didn't send the dopamine hits required to sit through it. I found Claude.ai in February 2025 during my injured month off work. I knew nothing about computers. I had my intuitive instincts and my automotive degree and experience. Claude taught me how to turn a Windows 10 HP desktop into a Ubuntu dev server. Ubuntu being a foreign word to me then - now every PC I own runs Pop!_OS 24. Ironic. So Claude gets me hooked into CS. This is the beginning of the demise of automotive for me. Something I genuinely was amazing at naturally and gifted at - now being applied to a foreign field. I asked Claude if he or another AI model could make 3D printable parts. He directed me to Meshy. At that time Meshy was far from capable. Fusion 360 costs an arm and a leg. Tinkercad is very limited. I said to myself - we have an AI that can literally teach me CS, but none with real CAD capabilities? So I built MVP1 with Claude Code. After spending a week learning how to set up an API to my PC terminal - I made a very scrappy but working proof of concept with OpenSCAD. I returned to the Chrysler Dodge Jeep dealer in March 2025. By the time I made it to my toolbox my service manager was there with a cardboard box and a letter. He said eagerly "Nick, Chrysler sent you something - in all my years doing this, this is a first. Open it, I want to see!" So I'm opening it and I feel guilty. I don't even know this award exists. "Congratulations! You received the Top 2,000 Technicians award for Mopar of the Year 2024, awarded by Stellantis of North America." I opened the box and just started laughing. It was a stool. I know it wasn't intended that way but the timing was horrible. My first day back and Chrysler said "here, take a seat, you deserve it." My knee and hip were already done and I was only 28. I should be happy and proud. That's how most people would feel. For me it was confirmation. No matter how good a tech I could be, there was always going to be a hard-coded ceiling. I hit it. Still in poverty. Now with physical damage that lowered my ceiling even further. I left a month later for mental health. My therapist took me out of work then ghosted me the last two visits. Because I was ghosted I couldn't revalidate my State TDI. I applied for unemployment. Denied. Every safety net failed. Then Snap-On called. "Hey man, the new service manager pushed your toolbox into the parking lot. I grabbed it - want me to bring it to you this weekend?" A $28,000 toolbox with over $50,000 in tools pushed into a parking lot. At that point I made a deal with myself. In July 2025 I will not work for another human being other than myself. I can't keep giving my all to others while getting nothing in return. So instead of a depressive spiral I got serious with AI orchestration. I built a custom C++17 computational geometry kernel with pybind11 bindings. Custom trained GNNs for DFM checks. AI latent encoder and decoder. Multimodal pipeline. Sketch-to-CAD. BRep. FEA. FEM. Closed-loop autonomous learning. Boolean ops. Triangulation. Signed distance fields. Parametric trees. Feature trees. A custom LLM tree for CAD. Over 400,000 lines of C++17 and 150,000 lines of Python bindings. Then I pivoted. Because LLMs speak Python natively. CadQuery is open source. It's the Python interface for OpenCascade's BRep kernel - the same kernel used by every CAD program including Fusion 360. Proven. Credible. I used everything I learned about CAD, AI orchestration, and my own proprietary pipeline to build PrintMakerAI. 155 users. 42% week over week growth. Live now at printmakerai.com. I'm a car mechanic who built this. Ask me anything

PrintMakerAI

Describe a part. AI builds it, views it, fixes it & renders

Describe a part. AI builds it, views it, fixes it & renders

Forum Threads

Whats the first thing you WOULD design?

Forum Threads

Whats the first thing you WOULD design?