Two STEP readers measured on 320 files: solidcore drops repeated placements so cylinder_twice is half its volume, while SolidCraft refuses 23 files. A STEP reader comparison with concrete volume and refusal failures.
Recurring agent failure issue in solidcraft (tangency-labs)
What engineers report
A recurring agent failure problem in solidcraft (tangency-labs) that mostly hits the mechanical designer.
Failure pattern: validation / failure
Analyst note
From the Grok pain-radar digests, Nov 8-9 2026 (Nov 8 8:41 AM ET through Nov 9 6:41 AM ET digests plus the Haitch editions). Verified live 2026-11-09: 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 solidcraft (tangency-labs).
Evidence
More recurring errors in solidcraft (tangency-labs)
- A FreeCAD PartDesign Body that FreeCAD calls one valid solid opens in SolidCraft as 5 open bodies with no volume, because the importer reads every intermediate shape in the archive, sketches included.MCAD · impact 74
- A hole pattern feature drew 18 vent holes (6x3 grid of 6 mm) and cut almost none of them: 18 holes should have removed 1,221 mm3, measured removal was 124 mm3. The timeline shows no error or warning, and the snapshot still draws all 18 hole circles, which makes it easy to trust by eye and miss in checking.MCAD · impact 74
- A large sketch imported from Fusion 360 into SolidCraft stalls on extrude, showing computing indefinitely and never finishing the operation.MCAD · impact 74
- Cylinder, modelled M10 thread, then Shell on an end face: Shell fails because the faceted thread leaves the body as triangles, not a valid solid, so fillets and booleans downstream fail too. The reporter argues the 'temporary' faceted cut will harden into a ceiling.MCAD · impact 74
- Extruding a connector boss up to the enclosure face with Join merged the enclosure into the connector body and took the connector name, so every later feature referencing the enclosure faces failed and the PCB sketched on it disappeared.MCAD · impact 74
- Faces bounded by a single vertex (closed spheres, cone tips, the way Parasolid writes them) do not import. The reporter's bearings exported from Onshape came in with no balls, with no error; the faces are just gone.MCAD · impact 74
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.