# SolidCraft: An Open-Source, Clean-Room Fusion 360 Rebuilt in Pure Rust — and AI Agents Can Drive It > Source: > Published: 2026-10-21 00:00:00+00:00 # SolidCraft: An Open-Source, Clean-Room Fusion 360 Rebuilt in Pure Rust — and AI Agents Can Drive It Professional parametric CAD has long been a walled garden: Fusion 360, SolidWorks, Onshape, Creo — powerful, expensive, proprietary, and utterly closed to automation beyond their own scripting APIs. [SolidCraft](https://github.com/tangency-labs/solidcraft) sets out to break that open. It’s an **open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Autodesk Fusion 360, written in pure Rust** — and it was built so AI agents can drive it natively. ## Real Parametric CAD, Not a Toy This isn’t a block-stacking Tinkercad clone. SolidCraft has the machinery that makes professional CAD actually useful: - **Sketches and constraints** — lines, arcs, splines, text, solved by their own constraint solver, with parameter-driven dimensions. - **Features on an editable timeline** — extrude, revolve, sweep, loft, fillet, chamfer, shell, draft, holes, threads, patterns, mirror, split, combine. Change a dimension upstream and the whole model rebuilds. - **Parameters and configurations** with unit-aware expressions. - **Assemblies** with joints, motion studies, contact sets, interference checks, and mass properties. - **Sheet metal** (flanges, hems, fold/unfold, flat patterns) and plastic enclosure features. - **File I/O** — STEP, IGES, 3MF, STL, OBJ, glTF, plus URDF export for robotics. The demo says it all: a Raspberry Pi 4 case modeled from scratch — sketch dimensioned to the board, extrude, fillet, shell, M2.5 standoffs patterned on the 58×49 mm hole rectangle, port cut-outs, vent slots, “Pi 4” engraved in DejaVu Sans Bold, PETG material with computed mass — then bump height 24→32 mm in Parameters and **everything rebuilds.** That’s genuine feature-based parametric CAD. ## The Agent-Native Part Here’s what makes SolidCraft worth writing about on this blog: **the desktop app, browser app, headless CLI, and MCP server all run the same commands.** The MCP server (`solidcraft-cli mcp`) means an AI agent models parts the exact same way the UI does. Headless, it spins up its own design session; with `--connect`, it drives the *running* app so you can watch it build in real time. One line wires it into Claude Code: ``` claude mcp add solidcraft -- solidcraft-cli mcp ``` This is the same philosophy we keep flagging as the real shift — [software designed from the ground up to be operated by AI agents](https://themenonlab.blog/free-my-tv-claude-code-ad-free-smart-tv-home-screen/), not just wrapped in a chatbot afterward. And it pairs naturally with the generative-3D work we’ve covered, like [turning a single photo into a relightable 3D asset](https://themenonlab.blog/supra-tex-single-image-3d-relightable-pbr-texture/): SUPRA-Tex gives you organic, textured meshes, while SolidCraft gives you *precise, dimensioned, manufacturable* parts an agent can parametrically adjust. ## Verified, Not Just “It Runs” I appreciate teams that are honest about maturity. SolidCraft calls itself *“early but usable for simple parts”* and backs it with evidence: **75 of 76 public reference parts match their analytic or FreeCAD-computed volume, area, center of mass, and bounding box** — the one holdout is a tracked bug. Geometry is checked against an “oracle” of real values, not assumed correct because the code compiled. That’s the right instinct for CAD, where a silently wrong fillet means a part that doesn’t fit. ## The Legal Angle Cloning a commercial product invites lawyers, so SolidCraft is explicit: it’s a **clean-room** implementation, designed from public documentation and general CAD conventions, independent and unaffiliated with Autodesk or any vendor, developed under documented clean-room contribution rules. Dual-licensed **MIT OR Apache-2.0.** ## Why It Matters An open, scriptable, agent-drivable parametric CAD kernel is a genuinely big deal. It means reproducible, version-controllable designs; parts generated and iterated by LLMs; and CAD that runs in CI, in the browser, or on a Raspberry Pi — no seat license, no cloud lock-in. For hardware startups, makers, and anyone building AI-driven design tools, this is foundational infrastructure finally going open. Try it in the browser, grab a desktop build, or point an agent at it. **Repo:** [github.com/tangency-labs/solidcraft](https://github.com/tangency-labs/solidcraft) · **Website:** [solidcraft.io](https://solidcraft.io) · **Browser app:** [solidcraft.io/app](https://solidcraft.io/app) · **Docs:** [docs.solidcraft.io](https://docs.solidcraft.io/)