ai-assisted-design-workflow

AI-Assisted Design: Build Faster in SolidWorks

You know SolidWorks. You know the click path for a boss extrude, you know what a fully-defined sketch looks like, and you have a feel for which features will cause a rebuild error before you even run it.

This workflow keeps all of that knowledge and removes the slow parts — navigating menus, re-entering dimensions, rebuilding after a typo. Instead you describe what you're building in plain language, the LLM proposes the exact tool call sequence, you review it in ten seconds, and SolidWorks builds it.

The goal is faster iteration on your designs — not just recreating sample parts. The sample parts (Paper Airplane.SLDPRT, Baseball Bat.SLDPRT, the U-Joint) appear throughout because they're excellent practice targets: the finished .SLDPRT file exists, so you can open the original, read its feature tree, and check whether your AI-assisted build produced the same result. Once you're comfortable with the loop, apply it to your own work.

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What You Need

Requirement	How to get it
SolidWorks installed and open	—
MCP server running	.\dev-commands.ps1 dev-run
Claude Code or VS Code Copilot Chat	Claude Code setup · VS Code setup
Python virtualenv activated	.\dev-commands.ps1 dev-install once, then auto

Quick server check — if the MCP server is running, this returns immediately:

.\.venv\Scripts\python.exe -c "from solidworks_mcp.server import create_server; print('OK')"

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The Design Loop

flowchart LR
    D(["1 - Describe<br/>Shape + dimensions<br/>in plain text"])
    P(["2 - Plan<br/>LLM proposes<br/>tool call sequence"])
    R(["3 - Review<br/>You read the list<br/>and approve"])
    E(["4 - Execute<br/>Claude Code runs<br/>the MCP tools"])
    C(["5 - Check<br/>Visual or<br/>feature tree"])
    I(["6 - Iterate<br/>Adjust and re-run<br/>only what changed"])

    D --> P --> R --> E --> C --> I
    I -->|new idea or fix| D

    style R fill:#fff3cd,stroke:#ffc107
    style C fill:#fff3cd,stroke:#ffc107