reverse-engineering-workflow

A workflow for rebuilding a SolidWorks part from a screenshot or rendered image by describing its shape, planning the steps, and then creating it feature by feature.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to recreate sample parts or other mechanical designs from images and compare the result with the reference.
Why use it?
It turns a visual reference into an ordered construction plan that SolidWorks tools can execute and check.

Agent

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add agents/andrewbartels1/solidworksmcp-python/reverse-engineering-workflow
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/andrewbartels1/SolidworksMCP-python
Per session 0 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 3,049 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00000 $0.03049
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.01524
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.00610
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00305

Measured 2d ago against content hash 9da85d7d8eab, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

reverse-engineering-workflow scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

docs/agents/reverse-engineering-workflow.md · 354 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 354 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

From Screenshot to SolidWorks: The Image-First Reconstruction Workflow

This tutorial shows how to take a screenshot or rendered image of a part — including the sample parts that ship with SolidWorks — and use prompting to recreate it from scratch using the MCP server.

The approach mirrors what an engineer does by eye: look at the shape, describe it in terms the CAD system understands, and build it feature by feature.

The sample parts used throughout this guide live at: C:\Users\Public\Documents\SOLIDWORKS\SOLIDWORKS 2026\samples\learn\


The Three-Prompt Pattern

Every reconstruction follows the same shape regardless of part complexity:

Prompt 1 — Describe          →  Prompt 2 — Plan             →  Prompt 3 — Build & Test
"What do you see in          →  "Turn that description       →  "Execute each step and
 this image?"                    into an ordered MCP             confirm the result matches
                                 tool sequence."                 the reference image."

The image goes into Prompt 1. Everything after that is text, but for any sample part where the original file is available you should treat the image description as provisional. Before finalizing a reconstruction plan, open the original part and read the feature tree.


Getting a Reference Image

Before prompting, you need a clear isometric or front-view image of the part.

Option A — Screenshot from SolidWorks directly

Open the sample part in SolidWorks (File > Open), orient the view to isometric (Ctrl+7), and press Print Screen or use the Snipping Tool. Save as a .png or .jpg.

Option B — Export from the MCP server

If the MCP server is running and SolidWorks is open with the file loaded:

open_model(file_path=r"C:\Users\Public\Documents\SOLIDWORKS\SOLIDWORKS 2026\samples\learn\Paper Airplane.SLDPRT")
export_image(file_path="paper_airplane_ref.jpg", format_type="jpg")
close_model(save=False)

The image is saved to disk and can be dragged into Claude Code or uploaded to any vision-capable chat interface.

Read the full file on GitHub · 354 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 354 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A 9da85d7d8eab

Subscribe to this mod's changes

reverse-engineering-workflow is an agent published in the GitHub repository andrewbartels1/SolidworksMCP-python (65 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 3,049 tokens. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.