We’ve all done it before: a simple project that escalated to the point of extreme overengineering.
But what’s less common is [Lee Hutchinson]’s digital clock, whose case is (somewhat-successfully) designed by LLMs! A clock needs time synchronization, and a digital one needs some code to drive the display. An avid systemd user, [Lee] had no trouble at all setting up all the users and services needed to keep the time synchronized. Some rusty Python skills with some aid of the dreaded Claude Code later, [Lee] had a script to actually show the time too.
But now comes the interesting part: the case. Now, [Lee] isn’t really a mechanical engineer, and he doesn’t really like Autodesk Fusion’s UX. Most projects would see their creators just grit their teeth and get on with it. But here, in an experiment we haven’t often seen before, [Lee] connects LLMs to Fusion’s new MCP server feature! Did it work? Surprisingly enough, yes. Kind of. The local Qwen model got most of the way there on one request, but still made mistakes for the other. However, another pass with the more powerful Claude models got the job done.
But there’s much more to the story; [Lee] goes into more detail, and talks about the assembly process, over at Ars Technica.