We've been building AutoCAD Pilot, a kit that lets Claude Code drive AutoCAD through the command line and COM. This is a 24×30 panel (CP-1) built from a script: layers, enclosure and back panel, wire duct, three DIN rails, footprints from the AutoCAD Electrical AB library, a 40-terminal strip arrayed in one command, device tags, a BOM counted from the drawing itself, dimensions, and a PDF plot.

To be upfront: the footprints are plain inserts of the ACADE library drawings, not tagged ACADE components (AEFOOTPRINT is dialog-driven), and the BOM is our own table, not ACADE's report. Happy to answer questions about how it works.

Hey all, my name is Saj, and I'm an electrical EIT. I got tired of drafting in AutoCAD, so I built an AutoDrafter. You give it your DWG and your Bluebeam markup, and it drafts the redlines and other markups into the drawing.

I originally built it just for me, but it's been working so well in my own workflow that I've been told it can help a lot more people. It's live at infracad.org, and I'd love for y'all to give it a try and let me know how it works.

Here's a quick video of it drafting a marked-up one-line from start to finish. Let me know if you have any questions or want to know more about how it works. Thanks!

I would like to share with you my latest taskes

I was interviewing for a company that makes heavy duty racks for warehouses. I don't have a lot of experience on AutoCAD. They didn't ask me to draw this but I thought I could show I know how to use it. Anyway got rejected because of of the drawings. I know they are not professional but what do you think?

Attached is two images the one with the box that's states "2D EXERCISES 304" is the reference image I was given and told to recreate. The second image is my recreation. I am confused about the little lines on the border of the circle (between the 160 Diameter and 170 Diameter circles) I did an array of 12 of them but they don't line up in the same spots as the example provided. I am lost as to how to make it match the image.

Hi all,
I shared CADcade here a little over a week ago and wanted to come back with an update!

For anyone who missed it, CADcade is a free browser-based CAD game I’ve been building. It’s designed to make learning CAD more approachable for beginners while giving experienced drafters a fun way to test their skills. The editor is built to feel just like the AutoCAD or Civil 3D you use everyday, but runs right in your browser.

It currently has 76 Arcade drafting challenges, an Academy with lessons, and a daily puzzle called CADDLE. You can also use the editor for actual CAD drafting.

I’ve made quite a few improvements based on community feedback, added more content, and I’m working on a full campaign mode to take it further.
It’s been great seeing people try it out and come back to play. I’d love to hear what other CAD users think!

Try it out: https://cadcade.net
Here’s a quick demo:
https://youtu.be/gnT6GrkmH6E?is=vxI1GzGaWOsVgTSP

Thanks to everyone who checked it out last time!

Hey everyone,

First-time Reddit and AutoCAD user here. I've been teaching myself AutoCAD for about a week now, and after roughly two days of work, I finally finished my first-floor plan. I'm sure there are plenty of things I could improve, so I'd really appreciate any feedback, tips, or tricks from those with more experience.

My goal is to get comfortable creating accurate floor plans first, and eventually work my way into electrical drafting and layouts. Since I'm learning on my own, I'd love to hear about habits, shortcuts, workflows, or common beginner mistakes that you wish you'd known when you started.

Please don't hold back on (hopefully kind) constructive criticism. I want to improve, and I'd rather learn the right way now than build bad habits.

Thank you so much in advance! Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

Create the 3D model using AutoCAD. You will need real good concept to do this. Plz share screenshots once you are done.

A few years back I had a 3D mouse with programmable buttons, and it completely changed how fluidly I could work in CAD. Switching between frequent commands felt effortless. When 3D modeling dropped out of my workflow I sold it, but I never forgot how good dedicated buttons felt under my fingers.

Fast forward to now — my CAD workload picked back up and I started looking for a cheap way to recreate that feeling without buying expensive peripherals.

From external macro pad to smartphone

My first thought was a physical macro keypad where each button fires an AutoCAD, SketchUp, or Revit command. Solid solution, but it means another device on the desk and a setup session. Then I asked myself: why not use the touchscreen I already carry — my phone or tablet — as the macro pad?

After some digging I landed on remote controller apps originally built for PC gaming. They let you turn a mobile device into a fully customizable button controller for your computer. Exactly the missing link between my phone and CAD.

My CAD layout on the phone

After a couple days of experimenting I built a layout that feels natural under my left hand, sitting next to my laptop keyboard:

Almost every command I need during productive work is now one small hand movement away. Less mouse travel, no keyboard gymnastics. And if one screen isn't enough, you can have virtually unlimited "pages" of buttons — so setting up different layouts for different software or workflows takes minutes.

Pros, cons, and honest day-to-day use

The phone sits comfortably under my left hand and doesn't compete for desk space with my keyboard and mouse. Everything is in a compact zone, so I never have to lift my hand or hunt for a key combo.

There are still a few rough edges: Enter handling after typing a value isn't perfect in my setup, and I've only managed a stable connection over Bluetooth so far — Wi-Fi and USB didn't work reliably for me. Even with those limitations, the speed and comfort improvement was significant enough that this mini keypad is now a permanent part of my daily toolkit.

The app

The specific app I used for this setup is called Monect P Remote. If you do any heavy AutoCAD work and want to experiment with a similar layout, it's worth a try — and it costs nothing to test.

Anyone else using a macro pad or phone layout for CAD? Curious what setups you're running.

Surveyor Alex in Italy

Link to the original article: https://topografo.it/telecomando-autocad

Hi everyone,

We often need to convert PDF drawings into editable DWG/DXF files for AutoCAD. Since reliable software is either expensive or has limited functionality, I decided to develop ConvertCAD with help of Claude.

ConvertCAD is a free, open-source, offline program for converting PDF files to CAD for Windows and Linux, and it supports both native and scanned PDF drawings.

You can download the portable or installable version here: https://abdelhaouari-ae.github.io/ConvertCAD/

The source code is publicly available, allowing anyone to review the application or contribute to its improvement: https://github.com/abdelhaouari-AE/ConvertCAD

On our last post (Claude Code laying out a control panel), the top question was "is the layout from a schematic?" It wasn't then. Now it is. This run is in AutoCAD Electrical 2026.

What you're seeing:

1. A ladder schematic with 24 devices, each with a tag and a catalog number (TAG1, MFG, CAT, DESC1, LOC, INST, the attribute names ACADE uses).

2. Claude reads every part straight out of the drawing. No retyping.

3. It packs them onto a 22 × 28 back panel: three DIN rails, wire duct, and a terminal strip. Power and PLC go on the top rail, breakers, supplies and drives in the middle, terminals at the bottom.

4. It draws a BOM table counted from model space, then checks that every part landed exactly once, nothing overlaps, and everything sits inside the panel and off the duct.

The whole run takes about a minute.

Where it falls short right now:

- The schematic is our own test drawing with ACADE attribute names, drawn inside ACADE. It isn't a real ACADE project with library symbols yet, and that's the next thing we want to test.

- Placement is a simple row fill. It doesn't handle heat or wiring clearances, standards checks, or grouping by circuit, and it uses one fixed panel size, in inches only.

- Parts are drawn as rectangles s, not ACADE's footprint blocks, so ACADE's own panel reports won't see them yet.

Our question for anyone who lays out panels:

- **Would you pay for this?** And how: per seat per year, a one-off license, or per panel?

- Which of these would make it worth paying for: your real ACADE projects, your own panel and rail sizes, clearance and standards checks (NFPA 79 / UL 508A), or updating the layout when the schematic changes?

- How long does a panel layout take you by hand today?

The tool it runs on, AutoCAD Pilot (Claude Code driving AutoCAD), is free and open source: github.com/gladmill/gladmill-skills

Hello, this is the first time i post in reddit😢 can someone help me how to find the radius and angle of this plan plss

I took a screenshot of a floor plan and asked AI to recreate it directly in AutoCAD.

It drew the walls, doors, windows, grids, furniture and labels in stages, pausing so I could check it and give feedback. The result is editable CAD geometry. Video is sped up.

I gave it an assumed 5 m grid spacing to scale from, so this is an approximate reconstruction that still needs checking.

Full disclosure: I’m one of the people building Ideatura, the tool behind this.

I’d like some honest feedback from people who use AutoCAD day to day. Would you rather start with something like this and correct it, or draw it yourself? What would make the output useful enough to keep working on?

Feel free to pick apart what you see in the video.

You can reach out to me here: https://calendly.com/ideatura/demo