FreeCAD in the Browser

(magik.net)

34 points | by cui 2 hours ago

7 comments

  • ebspelman 1 hour ago
    The launch graphic says "Ported end-to-end by Fable, an AI agent" and it definitely feels that way. Buggy, glitchy, needs some love and human eyes before it's really usable.
    • NavinF 1 hour ago
      FreeCAD on desktop is much the same in my experience. If LLMs were mainstream a few years ago I would have assumed the UI was 100% AI generated with zero human input besides a oneshot prompt.
      • cui 1 hour ago
        If Solidworks and Onshape were born after the birth of LLMs, they'd probably be glitchy as hell.
  • dang 1 hour ago
    Recent and related:

    LibreCAD in the Browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48755075 - July 2026 (17 comments)

  • s1mon 1 hour ago
    Onshape is free in the browser as long as you are not doing commercial work. It’s a professional system from the founders of Solidworks that competes with all the top CAD tools.
    • throwup238 1 hour ago
      > It’s a professional system from the founders of Solidworks that competes with all the top CAD tools.

      Because it's built on Parasolid, the same geometric kernel as everyone else. With ACIS pretty much out the door, almost all the professional CAD packages are just window dressing on the same CG implementation.

      • SequoiaHope 1 hour ago
        Agreed. I’m not OP but for six months I’ve been using Claude to build a from-scratch CAD kernel based on Rust and WASM, MIT licensed.

        The actual UI still needs a lot of work, but I’ve been focused on the kernel. Fable has helped a lot though Opus was already making great headway.

        I’m an OnShape power user going back about ten years, Solidworks before that. I need a CAD system that absolutely works. There is a lot of work to do still, and it still seems impossible to succeed, but I’ve been very happy with where things have been going with it lately.

        It’s serverless, local, and browser based. You can load the latest binary from GitHub pages here:

        https://sequoia-hope.github.io/waffle-iron/

        Click the Assay menu to see the kernel test cases we’ve been using so far. Rapidly closing on 100% support!

        • cui 28 minutes ago
          How long have you been building this?
          • SequoiaHope 21 minutes ago
            Six months. Basically when Claude code started to hit that inflection point I chose a project that seemed potentially impossible but was also something I care deeply about. (I have a lot of history with open source and CAD and I even made an open source CAD forum on GitHub a few years ago to discuss options.)

            I set up remote tmux access to my phone right at the beginning so I have been advancing it rather continuously during my waking hours. Especially the last few months which have been a very focused push on a new kernel architecture.

            • cui 4 minutes ago
              Respect.
        • 27183 42 minutes ago
          > It’s serverless, local, and browser based.

          uhh what..

          • SequoiaHope 27 minutes ago
            The app consists of a wasm (web assembly) binary and JavaScript. The wasm runs locally on your machine in your browser and communicates with the JavaScript frontend. There is no backend server to handle any part of the program. The URL just loads the binary in to your local browser. I don’t know exactly how one would set this up but this would work for example fully offline. The browser basically just becomes a universal compute and rendering engine for it.
  • dd8601fn 1 hour ago
    Sounds cool. Doesn't work.
    • devttyeu 13 minutes ago
      Author of the port here, you need a browser with JSPI support, which means recent Chrome, or Firefox Nightly with the feature flag flipped, or Firefox from the future.
      • devttyeu 9 minutes ago
        I will also note that it's possible to compile this with wasm asyncify, but the result iirc is a ~400MiB Wasm binary that will crash the browser tab before you will be able to do anything useful in it.
    • cui 1 hour ago
      Seems it's only supporting Chrome at the moment.
  • emmelaich 1 hour ago
    Amazing. How much did it cost?
    • devttyeu 12 minutes ago
      I made the port, roughly ~one maxed out Claude Max 20x sub, at the bottom of the article I've shared the full claude code transcripts, so you can probably to some rough math on token usage with that.

      Edit: to be precise 'maxed out' means one weekly limit on fable used over those 4 days

  • techbro92 2 hours ago
    Why would I want to run this in the browser vs locally?
    • SequoiaHope 1 hour ago
      Browser can be local. What’s nice about browser based is that browser based programs can run on every device. Though it sounds like this one requires chrome which seems weird to me.
    • gkhartman 2 hours ago
      Probably nice to have for those with low income that only have a Chromebook.
    • fragmede 2 hours ago
      Because then it doesn't matter what you're running locally, as long as you've got a supported browser (Chrome, I'm guessing). It means it doesn't have to make a difference if you have a Window 10 desktop or a MacBook Air or a Chromebook. Go to the web page and look at this CAD.
      • cui 2 hours ago
        This. The browser as a universal platform.
        • Evidlo 1 hour ago
          Like electron, but it's fine this way for some reason.