TL;DR: SF-based ML research team building a co-pilot tool for mechanical design. Looking for engineers willing to share real design iteration data (pre/post geometry with feature tree intact, plus the reasoning behind the change). Paid, NDA both ways, your IP stays yours. SolidWorks especially welcome; NX, Catia, Creo, Inventor, Fusion all useful too.
Hi all, I'm James. We're a small team of ML researchers based in SF. For the past few months we've been using CAD on some internal projects around camera hardware design, and the experience has been eye-opening — particularly how different the iteration workflow feels compared to what software engineering has become. Software has version control, diffs, commit messages, and increasingly a layer of AI tooling that takes meaningful work off your plate. CAD has none of that, and the gap is bigger than we expected.
So we'd like to do something about it. As a pilot project we want to build a co-pilot tool for mechanical design — something that can sit alongside an engineer and help with the iterative work of taking a part from one version to the next. Initially for our own use on the camera work, but we think the same tool could be genuinely useful to a much wider set of engineers if it's built right.
We have a reasonable amount of data from our own iterations to start with, but not nearly enough breadth — and what we have is heavily biased toward our specific domain. To build something that generalizes we need real design iteration data from a wider range of engineers and projects.
SolidWorks is one of the formats we most want to cover. What we're looking for is paired pre/post geometry from real design changes you've worked on, ideally with the feature tree and mate history intact, along with a sense of what triggered the change and the reasoning behind it. NX, Catia, Creo, Inventor, and Fusion are all useful too. Simulation results are valuable where they exist; assembly files matter when the change involved neighboring parts. The three patterns most useful to us are variants from a spec change (drop 15% mass, add a feature, swap a supplier), corrections after a failed simulation or physical test, and parts reworked because an adjacent component changed shape. Bias toward automotive and manufacturing, structural and thermal work especially.
We think this could be a genuinely cool thing to build, and we're looking for anyone who'd be interested in helping us get there.
- This is paid — happy to discuss specifics on a call once we know what you'd be contributing.
- Happy to cover any costs on your end (export time, file conversion, your team's time if there's an employer involved).
- NDA in both directions, your IP stays yours, narrow license for the research only.
We'll come back and share progress with this community once there's something worth showing.
Drop a comment or DM if you'd like to contribute!