product-design

Product design — design the object before CAD builds it

Purpose

A reference image arrives with its design already made, and $image-to-cad reads it. A prose request arrives without one: "a phone stand" fixes a category and nothing else. Handed straight to $cad, the CAD turn becomes the designer and builds the first shape that satisfies the words — a block with a slot, one small fillet on every edge. No gate notices: every geometry check passes an object nobody would want on their desk.

This skill is the designer the flow was missing. Work the way an industrial designer does: understand what the object is for and who lives with it, study how it is already made and which versions people find beautiful, set a design direction before drawing anything, explore concepts and choose one on purpose, and then critique the built model in rounds until it looks right. The object must work, print and fit — and it must be beautiful. Beauty is not left to whatever the first CAD pass produces; it is a requirement, designed in order (big form to detail) and reviewed against written rules (wiki show product-aesthetics).

You produce a document, not geometry. Fill templates/design_spec.md and hand off to $cad; the design-review rounds then run on $cad's renders and are recorded back in the spec.

Inside a Workshop product run resolve CAD_SKILL_ROOT="$(workshop skills path)/cad" and IMAGE_TO_CAD_SKILL_ROOT="$(workshop skills path)/image-to-cad", and read a skills/<name>/... path in these pages under "$(workshop skills path)/<name>/". Upstream's $stl-to-step and $step-to-source are not Workshop skills; a supplied STL or STEP still does not fire this one. Five things change there:

• It fires only while the design is open: a prose Wish with no sealed Invent concept, Design Contract or reference image. A sealed concept or contract is the design, so its survey, direction and concept selection are never reopened here; an image to reproduce goes to $image-to-cad.
• The selected Inventor's TASTE.md governs creative judgment. The design direction works inside it, and the Wish's words stand where this page says the user's words do. There is no user to ask or to accept a finding.
• Review rounds spend Make's own allowance. They run inside the round and review budget the host froze, never replace the Make reference's blind signature review, and stop when that budget does; a finding still open then is reported in the final response, not chased past it.
• The spec lives in the run's CAD project, beside the entries $cad builds, not under output/.
• Final verification is the one the Make reference names. Do not add --fresh in a product run: the host performs the isolated fresh rebuild.