How much benefit do you get for the CAD skills over having the money to hire someone else who has the CAD skills and a lot of experience with using them?
In my experience (beginner/intermediate CAD skills), this depends on how clearly you are able to explain the exact part you want.
If you only want parts which are easy to clearly describe, you can hire someone to CAD them up… or you could describe them to an LLM and have it emit files that you can convert to your CAD of choice.
If you want something less well-specified, or you want to “think out loud” and continually adjust your part’s design as you bring it into existence, the friction of having someone else running the software becomes prohibitive.
A similar question would be, how much benefit do you get from being able to type over having the money to hire someone who has typing skills and a lot of experience? Maybe you’d be fine with giving up that control over what words go onto the page, or maybe you’re using typing skills for something like driving a game or a text editor at a finer-grained level of control than would otherwise be available. Same with CAD.
Perhaps a more general way to approach the question would be can one identify the existing comparative advantages related to the wizard power related task to be performed.
If you only want parts which are easy to clearly describe, you can hire someone to CAD them up… or you could describe them to an LLM and have it emit files that you can convert to your CAD of choice.
Don’t know if this is still the case but 15 years ago something very similar existed with CAD/CAM production. The CAD design could be passed through a processor to generate the G-code (instructions the CAM processor reads and follows) and then some machinist would review and “fix” tool path or order to make the code more efficient for production.
The CAD design could be passed through a processor to generate the G-code (instructions the CAM processor reads and follows) and then some machinist would review and “fix” tool path or order to make the code more efficient for production.
This captures another angle on the question of whether one should learn a skill or outsource it: if the same person fixes the tool path and designs the component that needs the path fixes, that knowledge will inform their design choices on future parts. If there’s 2 ways you could draw a part and have it work how you need, then having the skills to fix the tool path and the knowledge to spot that one option would have worse path problems than the other will help you differentiate between the actual costs of the superficially interchangeable higher-level design options.
A key aspect of typing is that it allows other skills to be expressed. If I want a given software written, I need both my typing and my programming skills. Employing someone who has no typing skills to do the programming for me is a bad idea. On the other hand, if I employ some with programming skills equal or better to mine it works. For the quality of the end product, the programming skills are a lot more important than the typing skills.
Do you have an idea about what kind of skills your CAD skills allow you to express that a random person you hire with CAD skills might not possess?
Mostly the benefit to me of doing the full stack of a project—design/cad/build, sketch/draft pattern/ sew garment—come from learning something new about the situation partway through the process, and being able to immediately re-open prior “closed” decisions from earlier in the process to take full advantage of what I realized partway through.
When I do a 3D printing project, my first test prints tell me a bunch of details about exactly how my particular printer handles this one particular part, and it’s low effort to assimilate those observations into changing how I design or orient or support it for future attempts. Or I can revisit the entire plan of printing a part and fabricate it in a different way instead. In sewing projects, my pattern design and mockups and the fabric I’ve picked all inform one another, and when I learn that the fabric would do particularly well or poorly for a given detail, I can immediately revisit the top-level plan and change the details to work better with the material.
This effect is more pronounced when I’m doing projects farther from my established skill set. I rarely get the benefits I’m talking about on projects where I’ve done it a bunch of times already and know exactly what will happen. Once I know exactly how something will go, it’s easy to outsource the process—“here, do this exact task on these exact things and it’ll definitely work”. But more often, I’m not yet at that level of expertise and familiarity, so I’m learning new things in the course of a project, and it’s beneficial to be able to apply the new insights wherever they’re most impactful. The friction of outsourcing a component, waiting on someone else to do it, etc opposes my process of applying newfound knowledge to the project’s entire top-level description.
How much benefit do you get for the CAD skills over having the money to hire someone else who has the CAD skills and a lot of experience with using them?
In my experience (beginner/intermediate CAD skills), this depends on how clearly you are able to explain the exact part you want.
If you only want parts which are easy to clearly describe, you can hire someone to CAD them up… or you could describe them to an LLM and have it emit files that you can convert to your CAD of choice.
If you want something less well-specified, or you want to “think out loud” and continually adjust your part’s design as you bring it into existence, the friction of having someone else running the software becomes prohibitive.
A similar question would be, how much benefit do you get from being able to type over having the money to hire someone who has typing skills and a lot of experience? Maybe you’d be fine with giving up that control over what words go onto the page, or maybe you’re using typing skills for something like driving a game or a text editor at a finer-grained level of control than would otherwise be available. Same with CAD.
Perhaps a more general way to approach the question would be can one identify the existing comparative advantages related to the wizard power related task to be performed.
Don’t know if this is still the case but 15 years ago something very similar existed with CAD/CAM production. The CAD design could be passed through a processor to generate the G-code (instructions the CAM processor reads and follows) and then some machinist would review and “fix” tool path or order to make the code more efficient for production.
This captures another angle on the question of whether one should learn a skill or outsource it: if the same person fixes the tool path and designs the component that needs the path fixes, that knowledge will inform their design choices on future parts. If there’s 2 ways you could draw a part and have it work how you need, then having the skills to fix the tool path and the knowledge to spot that one option would have worse path problems than the other will help you differentiate between the actual costs of the superficially interchangeable higher-level design options.
A key aspect of typing is that it allows other skills to be expressed. If I want a given software written, I need both my typing and my programming skills. Employing someone who has no typing skills to do the programming for me is a bad idea. On the other hand, if I employ some with programming skills equal or better to mine it works. For the quality of the end product, the programming skills are a lot more important than the typing skills.
Do you have an idea about what kind of skills your CAD skills allow you to express that a random person you hire with CAD skills might not possess?
Mostly the benefit to me of doing the full stack of a project—design/cad/build, sketch/draft pattern/ sew garment—come from learning something new about the situation partway through the process, and being able to immediately re-open prior “closed” decisions from earlier in the process to take full advantage of what I realized partway through.
When I do a 3D printing project, my first test prints tell me a bunch of details about exactly how my particular printer handles this one particular part, and it’s low effort to assimilate those observations into changing how I design or orient or support it for future attempts. Or I can revisit the entire plan of printing a part and fabricate it in a different way instead. In sewing projects, my pattern design and mockups and the fabric I’ve picked all inform one another, and when I learn that the fabric would do particularly well or poorly for a given detail, I can immediately revisit the top-level plan and change the details to work better with the material.
This effect is more pronounced when I’m doing projects farther from my established skill set. I rarely get the benefits I’m talking about on projects where I’ve done it a bunch of times already and know exactly what will happen. Once I know exactly how something will go, it’s easy to outsource the process—“here, do this exact task on these exact things and it’ll definitely work”. But more often, I’m not yet at that level of expertise and familiarity, so I’m learning new things in the course of a project, and it’s beneficial to be able to apply the new insights wherever they’re most impactful. The friction of outsourcing a component, waiting on someone else to do it, etc opposes my process of applying newfound knowledge to the project’s entire top-level description.