This is Engineering Paper, and here’s the latest design and simulation software news.
First, follow-up: Last week I wrote about Leo AI, a mechanical engineering copilot that CEO Maor Farid claims can create designs indistinguishable from those of a human engineer. In other words, he said, Leo passes the “mechanical Turing test.”
Farid has now elaborated on that idea in an op-ed for Engineering.com: Opinion: AI has passed the mechanical Turing test. Check it out to learn more about Leo and Farid’s philosophizing on AI-assisted engineering.
On to today’s top story.
Onshape opens up to AI with FeatureScript MCP server
Onshape’s newly launched early-access program, Onshape Labs, has an exciting new experiment: the FeatureScript MCP (model context protocol) server.
An MCP server itself is not that exciting. Onshape is hardly the first CAD platform to adopt the protocol, which opens an application to AI platforms like Claude, Gemini, or ChatGPT. What is exciting is that FeatureScript, Onshape’s custom programming language, hitherto useful but often out-of-reach, might suddenly become the star of the whole platform.
“A lot of our users are just not developers to the degree necessary to build a more elaborate custom feature,” Cody Armstrong, senior director of Onshape AI innovation, told me. Now, with the FeatureScript MCP server, those users can set their favorite chatbot to the task instead.
“You connect your AI to our MCP server toolkit,” Armstrong said. “It’s purpose-built for not only creating custom features, but testing and evaluating those features as well.”
What kind of features are we talking about? Theoretically, since Onshape itself is built in FeatureScript (every change to every CAD model is captured as a line of viewable FeatureScript code), the sky’s the limit. But the immediate value is in creating custom features to automate repetitive parts of your workflow.
Armstrong and Darren Henry, senior vice president of general operations at PTC (which owns Onshape), showed me several examples during a recent demo. They ranged from simple features, like one that generated a bottle thread on a selected face, to more sophisticated, like one to generate configurable sprockets. Henry showed me a feature that visualized the fill level of a tank and another that calculates how an arbitrary chunk of ice would float in fresh water—or salt. Armstrong even showed me an entire shell-and-tube heat exchanger built with FeatureScript.
“I don’t know how to program,” Henry emphasized. “Everything I showed you was 100% AI generated.”
Since MCP is an open protocol, the FeatureScript MCP server works with any compatible AI platform. Henry says a coding LLM works best. He prefers Claude Code, but told me others on the team use ChatGPT’s Codex or GitHub Copilot.
I’ve commented before that AI coding agents could be an interesting shortcut to AI-based CAD, since generating code seems to be much easier than generating geometry. Regular readers may remember HelloTriangle, a Python-based CAD tool with an AI coding agent, as one of several examples of this approach.
But Onshape is the most established of all of them, and Henry believes the platform is onto something big.
“We’re excited because we think this takes CAD in a brand new direction,” he told me. “You need a production level CAD system that’s powerful, but now we’ve opened the gate so it can be customized to your needs. We think these next few weeks we’re going to see thousands of examples.”
If you’re an Onshape user of any subscription tier, you can access the FeatureScript MCP server here. Let me know what you think of it at malba@arrowfly.com.
SimScale releases AI agent for simulation
Onshape isn’t the only cloud-based engineering software releasing AI features.
SimScale has launched an AI agent for its cloud simulation platform that, according to the company, “can run complete simulation workflows autonomously, from CAD geometry clean-up, to simulation set-up, through to validated output report.”
In a video accompanying the announcement, SimScale flashes example prompts including “Can you help me respond to an RFQ?”, “Please set up the crush test” and “Let’s look at design alternatives using Physics AI models.”
SimScale says the AI agent has been “proven with enterprise customers” over the past year.
“For most of engineering history, simulation was something a handful of specialists did at the very end of a project, long after the decisions that mattered had already been made,” said SimScale CEO David Heiny in the company’s press release. “What 900,000 users tell us is that this has flipped. AI-native engineers are testing ideas on day one.”
You can also watch Heiny in conversation with Engineering.com’s Jim Anderton in AI in Engineering: Separating Hype from Reality.
One last link
From Engineering.com senior editor Michael Ouellette: Scaling AI agents is where things get complicated.
Got news, tips, comments, or complaints? Reach me at malba@arrowfly.com.
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