Bobby Ng STEPs Up with Transfigure

Your CAD tool can’t read your intent, but your fabricator still has to. That gap is where AI CAD promises a lot and often delivers noise, broken geometry, or subscription regret. We sit down with Bobby, a mechanical engineer and founder of Transfigure, to get specific about what actually works today and what still fails when you demand a real STEP file you can open and use for getting a quote or for manufacturing. Bobby started with a blunt experiment: ask an LLM to generate a simple one-inch cube as a STEP file. The output looks believable, yet it the file is empty. From there, we unpack why “text to CAD” and agent-driven kernel scripting can hit hard limits, especially as geometry gets more complex and as file sizes grow from kilobytes to megabytes and beyond. Bobby explains Transfigure’s current 2D to 3D workflow, why engineering drawings, sketches, and even photos are a practical input, and how the goal is to hand you a manufacturable STEP file instead of trapping you in a feature tree. We also talk sheet metal realities like bend radius and standardized thickness, the quoting pain machine shops face when customers only have 2D, and a real-world demo flow that goes from a sketch to Fusion to CNC with partners like Tormach. We close with the business side: per-generation credit pricing, why many AI CAD tools feel “tainted,” and why a bespoke foundation model may be the only path to reliable AI-generated geometry.