text-to-cad (earthtojake) errors

13 recurring problems engineers report in text-to-cad (earthtojake), ranked by impact.

#33 by errors trackedMCAD

Recurring text-to-cad (earthtojake) errors, by impact

  1. 1A sheet-metal DFM check passed a flat pattern that was 0.4 mm short each way, with nothing said. An 80 x 40 x 2 mm plate with 0.2 mm rounds on both skins unfolded to 79.6 x 39.6 and the sheet check said OK. With 0.5 mm rounds it failed with the flat pattern holds 97 percent of the part's material, and the unfold function raised an error. The unfold used the skin outline, not the cut outline, and hexagons and chamfered outlines do it too.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report74
  2. 2After moving to OCP 8, strict STEP volume comparison failed on an F-14 empennage sample on both versions and a direct build123d STEP import produced two invalid solids, while the project's own reader called every prototype valid.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report74
  3. 3The tool meshes every part at 0.25% of the mean bounding-box side, and the viewer and STL/3MF exports share that mesh, "configurable nowhere". For an 85 x 94.5 x 75 mm hopper modelled with a 0.2 mm offset around a grinder body, the export's deflection is about 0.21 mm, roughly the entire clearance. The reporter measured it against their own BRepMesh run at 0.01 mm. A setting chosen for the viewer quietly decided the manufacturing file.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report74
  4. 4A new four-way failure classifier duplicated what telemetry already decides when it counts a crash. They dropped it and reused telemetry's rule so the Report Issue button and crash counts can't disagree. Small, but the same pattern as two parts of one system computing the same fact.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  5. 5A text-to-cad model shows a shop what to make but not how exact it has to be: hole size limits, position and flatness sit only on a drawing. The PR writes them as AP242 semantic PMI into the STEP, reads each STEP back, refuses one that lost a requirement, and lists faces with no requirement instead of filling them in.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  6. 6cad_http was listed for the agent so it could flip telemetry; now it is app-only, and a call without the page's capability header is refused before routing, while the agent keeps cad_open/show/view/screenshot and export tools. The tunnel shared between page and agent was the wrong trust boundary.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  7. 7OCCT Booleans on two lofts sharing a section return an empty fuse, a zero common, or a cut bigger than the original body.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  8. 8OCCT optimal bounds can sit inside a B-spline shape: a sphere reaching -20 reports xmin of about -19.83, changing measurements and selection.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  9. 9On Windows, every cadgen snapshot fails because the OCP wheel cannot save an image to a stream, though saving to a file works. Installed via the Claude Code plugin, so the agent can build the model but cannot look at it.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  10. 10One CAD MCP tool did reads, writes and telemetry under a single annotation, so a host that gates writes would prompt on every asset the viewer loads; split into three tools.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  11. 11Running cad setup from the Claude desktop app on Windows writes state into the MSIX package container. "Inside the Claude app everything looks fine... Outside it (Codex, Windows Terminal, IDEs), %LOCALAPPDATA%\cad-state doesn't exist." Saved settings, telemetry choice included, only exist in that container. Workaround is to install from a normal terminal.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  12. 12Thirty-two of 399 agent snapshot renders failed in the field, and unknown keys were ignored silently so an unrecognized position key drew a cut through the middle.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  13. 13URDF and SDF readers treated a Windows path like C:/x/y.stl as a remote URI with scheme 'c' and skipped the mesh; the same logic lived in five places, so fixing only three would let SDF validation pass an SDF the viewer then refuses.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report66

How it fails

  1. Agent failure13

Engineering tools that address these errors

Sourced from public community reports. Costs and delays on individual entries are modeled estimates, not measurements.