Security, Science & HardwareDone with Codex, Claude Code
Generate a robot arm CAD model from one prompt
A text-to-cad skill let Codex produce a 7-DOF robot arm with kinematics, a GUI and STEP parts in one demo prompt, though not the gripper.
- What They Did
- Jake Fitzgerald installed the open source text-to-cad skill package in Codex, running GPT 5.5. The agent writes build123d Python scripts, regenerates the geometry locally, and outputs STEP parts plus a URDF. In a 22-second demo, one prompt produced a 7-DOF arm with working kinematics and a custom GUI, driven almost entirely by prompting.
- How It Went
- The arm's URDF, kinematics, GUI and STEP assembly were all generated, except the gripper. Fitzgerald says similar work would have taken weeks across half a dozen tools. Commenters questioned the joint limits and parts that wouldn't assemble.
- Worth Knowing
- The homepage benchmark prompt was an excerpt. Real runs expand a short request into a full spec with GPT 5.5 Pro first, so vague prompts will likely do worse.
Try it yourself with Codex
Using a text-to-CAD approach with CadQuery, generate a model of [a robot arm / mechanism] with [number of joints, size, and constraints] in [folder]. Include the parts as separate STEP files and a simple viewer so I can inspect it. Finish by listing any parts you could not model well so I can handle them myself.
Do this with a skill.
These SkillShop playbooks do this exact job.