Is Lewis Valentine Real? Solo Developer Creates Geometry Kernel and CAD Program

A lot of “AI for CAD” talk still feels like a wrapper around old tools, so we wanted to get closer to the engine room. Lewis joins us to explain how he went from years at ACIS  and is now building his own CAD kernel and a browser-based solid modeler. It is wired it up to Anthropic Claude through an MCP plugin so the model can run tools on a real computer and output real CAD data. We dig into what makes text-to-CAD genuinely useful for engineers: not just generating shapes, but producing editable STEP files, surviving fussy details like fillets and blends, and behaving less like a guesser and more like a careful intern who can learn fast. Lewis walks us through why “train on how experts used SOLIDWORKS” is not the same as building reliable geometry, and how constrained prompts plus workflow metadata can keep AI work from falling apart as tasks grow. The demos are insane! Not only had Lewis managed the Great Bracket Challenge (that's a joke), but also a drafting table and, hard to believe, a variable stator for a turbine. A gas turbine can be a jet engine or a power-generating device. Boom Supersonic bragged about creating one. Lewis had FeatureBoard, his CAD program, create what looks like a fairly complete CAD model from four screenshots.We follow the thread into synthetic test data for kernel hardening, automated bug logging, design-for-manufacturing checks, technical drawings, and even the path toward auto-quoting. We also touch on robot welding simulation, interoperability with STEP AP242, and why “foundational CAD models” may be less mysterious when you view geometry as language and computation.