I am working on ShopSpec (https://shopspec.io/), a tool for designing bookshelves and cabinets. Enter the dimensions and it generates the parts, cuts, sheet layout, and build steps.
I built it because I wanted to spend less time drawing boxes in CAD and more time building them. Still early and I'd love feedback from other woodworkers.
I would love to hear more about your oddly-shaped non-rectangular room.
For now rectilinear has made things simpler; but on this kick now with 3d-printed jigs also derived from the spec. I already have a dog-hole system worked out and in-place with this idea. Could be interesting to extend to curves - becomes approachable/repeatable.
I would love to have floor to ceiling custom shelves. On my second floor I have ceilings that are angled instead of flat and would love to still have the usable space for books. Stuff like this is what I would love to make:
I'm threading this now and have paired AI-assisted development with woodworking knowledge. Partially chose to work on this because I wanted to build in a domain that the models might have a tougher time understanding.
Parallels and interests overlap everywhere between programming and woodworking; decisions about tooling, tolerances, sequencing, and what can be easily fixed later.
The models get rectangles pretty well and has been fun exploring a parametric casework planner for my own shop.
For me, it was during an on-going incident in a failing IoT OTA service which was growing in priority; taking two items I was unfamiliar with and bolting together new OTA mechanism via alternative SMS provider. I'd never developed in .NET ecosystem before and happened to gain access to another team's Twilio account in a prior week, so took a shot, planned interfaces to extract and implemented alternative Twilio implementation + feature flag
Normal software instincts plus access to a different service flushed the buildup of OTA's and lives on as a fallback mechanism. Amazed me going from idea to execution faster than I could have ever dreamed of even on-boarding myself to the area or environment.
I’ve had a similar experience building a geometry/woodworking-flavored web app with Three.js and SVG rendering. It’s been kind of wild how quickly the SOTA models let me approach a new space in spatial development and rendering 3d (or SA optimization approaches, for that matter). That said, there are still easy "3d app" mistakes it makes like z-axis flipping or misreading coordinate conventions. But these models make similar mistakes with CSS and page awareness. Both require good verification loops to be effective.
I think there is a pattern. It has a hard time with temporal and spatial.
Temporal. I had a research project where the LLM had no concept about preventing data from the future to leak in. I eventually had to create a wall clock and an agent that would step through every line of code and ensure by writing that lines logic and why there is no future of the wall clock data leaking.
Spatial. I created a canvas for rendering thinking model's attention and feedforward layers for data visualization animations. It was having a hard time working with it until I pointed Opus 4.7 to some ancient JavaScript code [0] about projecting 3d to 2d and after searching Github repositories. It worked perfect with pan zoom in one shot after that.
No matter how hard I tried I couldn't get it to stack all the layers correctly. It must have remembered all the parts for projecting 3d to 2d because it could not figure out how to position the layers.
There is a ton of information burnt into the weights during training but it can not reason about it. When it does work well with spatial and temporal it is more slight of hand than being able to generalize.
People say, why not just do reinforcement learning? That can't generalize in the same way a LLM can. I'm thinking about doing the Rubik's Cube because if people can solve that it might open up solutions for working temporal and spatial problems.
I built it because I wanted to spend less time drawing boxes in CAD and more time building them. Still early and I'd love feedback from other woodworkers.