I have several personal tools I’ve built and maintained.

It’s always more work than it looks. You can get to mostly usable tools quickly if your request isn’t too difficult, but every time I use them I run into another thing that needs to be fixed, changed, clarified, or cleaned up.

It’s fun at first, but over time you realize you’re spending more time building the tools than using the tools to build the thing you originally wanted to work on.

I think personal software is best for highly specific tools or for things you need to use repeatedly for a very long time.

For something like a SketchUp competitor, I wouldn’t want to try to maintain my own. The number of edge cases and features is bigger than you imagine up front, and the vibecoded version that might appear a few hours after your prompt is going to be very far from the version you want to use.

My experience is it's short to get a working tool and long to finish. Many 3D modulers (blender for example) have literally 1000s of features. Yes, you might not need all of them but you probably need 100s, each with quirks and UI/UX decisions. Just iterating on camera controls can take days. You get an orbit camera working via a prompt. But then find it only zooms in/out so far because the LLM decided that was ideal. So you prompt to fix that. Then you find moving the camera is not zoom aware so it moves in meters per frame and when you're zoomed in things move too faster. So you prompt to fix that. Repeat 10000x. Every feature, extrude, bevel, chamfer, subdivide, select vertices, select faces, select edges, etc etc all require this handholding and finese.

At least that's my experience.

Small tools with few features is great. a 3D modeler is not that.

I really appreciate this sentiment, and at the same time there are real opportunity costs to building and maintaining your own tools. Even in the era of tokens.

I think it comes down to where you want to spend your time and attention.

https://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html

> I wonder if we are entering an era in which it’s just better to build your own tools

Not necessarily. But only if what you need is not available in open source or not achievable by forking open source. Otherwise it’s a waste of money (token) and attention. This is a significantly smaller pool that “build [all] your own tools”.

Although, AI mega corpos would love if we do constantly re-build everything. You can tell by the tendency of the agents to write everything from scratch instead of importing the code that does the same thing or better.

I literally just had Claude build a 3D modeler slice of Blender that I wanted but that also works in VR [video: (https://www.reddit.com/r/aigamedev/s/q5Y6cskYb9)]

I think the value of adapting full tools to your own workflow far outweighs the maintenance costs nowadays. The tool above for instance took my agent a couple hours and it was good to go. It wasn’t a small slice by any means either: it supports edit/obj mode, extrude, loop cuts, modifiers like subdiv, save/load, undo/redo, bones, auto rig, posing, and more.

Mind you, this is a slice of an open source tool which was still outside of what I wanted from it. Cost wasn’t even part of the equation here.

> At the same time I wonder if we are entering an era in which it’s just better to build your own tools

I wonder if Claude Code and other similar tools start to maintain their own base apps that everyone keeps asking for? This would be like a "cache" that makes the requests cheaper/easier to deliver?

Then everyone's "own" apps is really just a customization layer on top of a solid base that already does all the heavy lifting.

So many people are building their own versions of:

- PDF editors

- Word processors

- 3D editors

- Video editors

- Pixel-based image editors

- Vector-based image editors

- CAD editors

etc.

In some of these there are a few flavors as well that are major architectural choices. But most of what people are doing is just playing around with UI and file formats. Much of the functionality is generally the same.

I think that could be true once you're experienced enough to know what you want.

Before that, though, I think you have to learn what the experts do and what can be done and what you should want. And then you can start to make your own opinions.

By then, unless the major players have done it really wrong, you're not going to make something better than what already exists.

Right now, it's different, because we have that experience prior to the ability to just wish up an app and have it happen.

I have always been skeptical of the reality of this, especially for businesses. But then one person on our CSM team spent a week building an alternative to Gainsight, saving the company like $90k a year. Granted, it required a technical person to do it even with vibe coding, but it doesn’t take much of his time to maintain it.

Looking at CRM tools these days and they are so complicated that I’m thinking of just using my tool and add features as I need them.

Would love to hear advice from people who use CRM tools on the job.

This just sounds so horribly inefficient though i’m sure the makers of LLMs love you.

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Once upon a time, not so long ago, people gained skills by learning about things instead of outsourcing all the hard parts.

By outsourcing the modeling to Claude or whatever, you don't learn how to build 3d models on your own. You've become dependent on the LLMs, and you're trivially replaceable by someone who can build 3d models on their own...because they can also learn to tell Claude to do all the work.

Skip the 3D modeler and have the agent do the operations directly instead.

A good visualizer might be useful thought! If that part of the work needs to be validated.

Just have Claude generate assets like that with blender or something. It gets you good enough 3d models pretty quick

Classic case of high value to end users but low revenue, because ease of use doesnt bring money.

Gained a huge user base quickly then sold to Google who wanted it apparently to help people toy around in Google earth, then they did little with it and eventually sold to Trimble, mostly a surveying company, who similarly had hopes it would help expand their users and market reach, which it hasnt really its mostly still evades commercial revenues and continues to be used by the same kind of users as originally

I've had some good luck with using Claude (Opus 5.5) for making models for 3D printing just by describing the thing I want (with measurements if you've got em) and having it create an OpenSCAD file.

It's also weirdly good at taking an existing STL file of a functional print and writing some python to modify it.

One example was a badge holder that I liked the design of, but only held 2 badges. I wanted 3, plus a slot on the back for a key. Gave it measurements of the key, it grafted a key slot on the back, and added the third badge slot. In typical 3D printing fashion, of course I had to print like 5 iterations of the thing until the sizing of everything actually worked.

>every time I draw a rectangle it asks me to name the object;

yeah this seems insane. The push/pull also doesn't work the way I expect it to. Sketchups main selling point was how easy it was to use and pick up

Thank you for this link!

wow this is a really well-built application, it even comes with its own MCP server and LLM integrations, nice work.

Free-as-in-freedom FSF style implies the natural follow on question to "am I allowed to change it" is "how easy will it be for me to change it"...

PS. I think you might also want to review the comment guidelines on this site... e.g. "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. "

I run it on Arch

It matters because if it used Electron, people may say it will use more RAM.

yeah, it didn't think much of it until I started seeing a lot of stars on Github.. I think I'll rename it Dovetail3D

The name also makes no sense anymore. Isn't it obvious that "SketchUp" is itself just a thin pun that references the word "ketchup"? They're just calling it nearly the exact same thing except that now "ketchup" on its own no longer has anything to do with drawing or sketching anything!!

Better rename it to “I Can’t Believe it’s Not Cat Soup 3D”

export menu lists stl and obj.

It's not even a pun! The original name was barely a pun at all... this just the original name with any semblance of pun removed! Agh!

hew3d does apparently

Pretty much all software is built using LLMs. That's a rather harsh filter.