A tool that rebuilds a feature history for SolidWorks parts checked the rebuild against the original geometry by volume and area only. A body in the wrong place, or turned a quarter so its extents swap, has the same volume and area, so simple sketch-and-extrude blocks rebuilt 6 mm off, or rotated, came back 'verified' with the wrong shape. The fix pairs bodies by box centre and compares every box coordinate within a tolerance, and keeps the history as partial when they disagree.
Recurring agent failure issue in dutchman (dutchman-cad)
What engineers report
A recurring agent failure problem in dutchman (dutchman-cad) that mostly hits the mechanical designer.
Failure pattern: validation / geometry
Analyst note
From the Grok pain-radar digests, Nov 11-12 2026 (Nov 11 8:41 AM ET through Nov 12 5:41 AM ET digests plus the Haitch editions). Verified live 2026-11-12: issue/PR read; title and state confirmed.
What it costs a team
Modeled annual cost
$30,000
For a team of 5
Prototype delay
3 days
Modeled schedule slip per occurrence
Time lost
240 min
Per engineer per month, about 1 incidents
How the cost is modeled
240 min/month × 5 engineers × 12 months = 240 hours × $125/hour = $30,000
A modeled estimate with medium confidence. Swap in your own team size and loaded rate to size it for your team.
Engineering tools that address it
No engineering tool profile lists this error yet. Browse tools that connect to dutchman (dutchman-cad).
Evidence
More recurring errors in dutchman (dutchman-cad)
- FreeCAD Assembly documents often hold links to Bodies in sibling .FCStd files and no geometry of their own; conversion went from 0 of 32 to 32 of 32 assembly recipes once links were resolved across files, with volume within 0.0001 relative and bounding box within 0.01 mm. Missing targets and cyclic links are now reported as omissions instead of failing the whole thing.MCAD · impact 74
- FreeCAD stores horizontal and vertical sketch distances with a sign; Dutchman linked the positive dimension to the signed parameter, SolidCraft rejected 'dimension value -2.5' on replay, and the whole feature history was flattened. Across 349 FreeCAD recipe files, verified histories went from 159 to 167 with the fix, so more than half still do not carry over.MCAD · impact 74
- Converting a public 88-component SolidWorks assembly ran out of memory at 24 GB because each part was read every time it was referenced. Reading each once brought it to about 4 minutes at 14 GB.MCAD · impact 66
- FreeCAD spreadsheet formulas and parameter references lost their expressions on conversion even when the identity data was there.MCAD · impact 66
- One feature that cannot convert to editable history used to throw away all earlier features on import; now the editable prefix is kept beside the original shape.MCAD · impact 66
Sourced from public community reports. Costs and delays are modeled estimates, not measurements. Know a better source or a fix? Tell us at hello@productflo.io.