Getting the mechanical engineers out of the CAD loop
CAD: Friend or Foe?
In the last few decades, Computer-Aided Design (CAD) software has allowed innovation within design and technology to thrive. It has developed some of the world’s most iconic products, from airplanes to smartphones; however, as remarkable as CAD systems are, there are inherent frustrations that seemingly exist with CAD. Those within the industry are likely siloed into one specific niche, spend endless hours designing the same thing, and are unable to easily collaborate within a single file. If you’ve worked with CAD you can probably empathize with at least one of these.
Stuck in Silos
Over the last few decades, that knowledge has become dangerously siloed: each engineer, each company, even each department collects its own “stash” of specialized procedures, insights, and unspoken rules. There’s no easy way to share or democratize that experience
Imagine an engineer who started out fascinated by engines but ended up spending 30 years solely designing brake ducts. Another devoted an entire career to crafting just the perfect seat cushion. This kind of specialization isn’t uncommon—once someone becomes highly skilled at a niche task, it’s hard to move to another domain without sacrificing salary, seniority, or both. It’s an industry-wide phenomenon that locks people into narrow career paths.
At the same time, countless designs—think motorcycles, automotive components, or consumer products—have been created from scratch countless times. You would think that, by now, starting a new motorcycle design would be as simple as pulling up an existing CAD template and making some modifications. But in practice, if you’re at a new company or on a new team, you end up starting from scratch. This is due to a few reasons:
By first principles, you cannot properly “share” or “re-use” designs when each small tweak can break an entire assembly’s parametric relationships. The net result? Everyone just starts from near-zero again.
Dichotomy Between “Collaborative CAD”
More modern CAD tools advertise having “collaborative” features—cloud-based file sharing, multi-user checkouts, and version controls. These features make it sound like collaboration within CAD shouldn’t be an issue, but in reality it only makes it slightly easier to distribute files or track changes. The core problem continues to remain: CAD has serial dependencies built into its structure .
When a surface or curve is adjusted in one component, you may need to modify adjoining components.
A minor gradient shift can invalidate hours—or days—of work.
Engineers often have to “rollback” to earlier steps in the feature tree. This rollback might break unrelated items in ways you didn’t expect.
As a result, giving many engineers their own components and telling them to “collaborate in parallel” simply does not work. Even if each component theoretically takes one hour to design, you will not be able to finish the whole assembly in an hour, because these interface dependencies create a domino effect. This means that the long-held dream of truly parallel, collaborative CAD design is effectively a dichotomy—it conflicts with the nature of how CAD features are built and managed.
Enter Agents
We hope to address these issues with an intelligence layer, or “Agentic systems.” Agentic systems can bridge the evident gaps we have just discussed by acting like a virtual engineer alongside you, leveraging massive repositories of domain knowledge, historical designs, and real-time manufacturing constraints.
At Hanomi, we’re confident that the age of agentic design is upon us. If you’re excited about a future where you can go from a blank canvas to a fully functional prototype in record time—without sacrificing quality or incurring endless design revisions—we’re building that future for you. Stay tuned for our upcoming blog posts where we’ll dig deeper into the technical specifics of how our design agent works, show real-world examples, and explain how we’re forging partnerships with manufacturing software and simulation providers to make this vision a reality.
Jan 23, 2025
Britney Lee
