April 10, 2026
Flashbacks, fillets, and feels
Show HN: FluidCAD – Parametric CAD with JavaScript
JavaScript meets 3D: fans gush, skeptics grill, and someone yells 'Flash vibes'
TLDR: FluidCAD lets people build 3D models by writing JavaScript and seeing changes live, with a rewindable build history. The crowd is split between hype (Flash-era creativity vibes) and scrutiny (what engine, which features, where’s the API), plus a rivalry nod to Maker.js and the meme: “was this vibe-coded?”
Developers are buzzing over FluidCAD, a new tool that lets you write JavaScript and watch 3D shapes appear in real time—drag a shape into 3D, smooth edges, hollow it out, then lock it in with code. The pitch: a friendly design experience plus the power of scripting, with a step-by-step “recipe” history you can rewind. But the real spectacle is the comment section. One sleuth marched in with a checklist—“what engine, which features, where’s the API, and was this vibe-coded?”—lighting up the thread with meme energy. A rival camp asked, “why not just use Maker.js?” and a third crew declared this a lifeline from clunky tooling elsewhere, with one Go user sighing that their ecosystem “doesn’t seem great.” The nostalgia surge was loud: a commenter compared it to Flash—the old web tool that let artists draw and then script magic—arguing FluidCAD could unlock the same “start simple, grow into code” workflow for 3D. Meanwhile, hype fans shouted “awesome,” but the adults in the room want receipts: engine details, supported operations, and an API link. Verdict: equal parts starry-eyed excitement and tough-love interrogation, with jokes flying and stakes high for anyone who wants code-first CAD to finally feel easy.
Key Points
- •FluidCAD enables parametric CAD modeling by writing JavaScript with real-time 3D visualization.
- •A non-destructive history allows stepping through a feature tree and rolling back to any point.
- •Interactive viewport tools let users extrude regions by dragging, then finalize values in code.
- •Transforms support linear/circular patterns, mirroring, and rotation of feature sequences.
- •Interop defaults reduce boilerplate: operations target recent sketches/selections and fuse touching shapes; setup takes under a minute.