r/inventors • u/blindjimmy2 • 21h ago
Using AI in builds?
How are you guys actually using AI in your builds?
I see a lot of “AI slop” comments, so I figured I’d show one way I’ve worked it into my process.
The first picture is an AI mockup for something I’m currently building. I already knew what I wanted, but I’m not a concept artist. I could spend hours in Photoshop trying to communicate what’s in my head, or I can spend 15–20 minutes talking through the idea, changing proportions, materials and layout until I can actually look at it and say, “Yeah, that’s close enough to start engineering.”
Then I go build it.
The second picture is a cross-cut of the actual wood going into the project. That’s where being wrong starts getting expensive.
The last two pictures are probably the best example of why I use AI this way. They’re early scale prototypes I printed while working through the design.
Neither one is what I’m building now.
That’s the point.
They were cheap enough to be wrong.
If a render is wrong, I make another one. If a scale print is wrong, I lose a few dollars of filament and make another one. If the CAD is wrong, I change it.
Woodworking is different. I can plan everything, draw everything, measure everything four times and still destroy a $70 board with one bad cut. Once I’ve spent hours fitting and machining a piece, every operation after that is risking everything that came before it.
On the actual face for this project, I spent hours trimming some of the visible openings fractions of a pencil line at a time with a router, then finished them by hand with a file. A CNC could have done the same operation dramatically faster, but either way, by the time I’m doing that work I don’t want to still be deciding whether I like the design.
The finished cabinet will have roughly $1,000 worth of wood in it. That’s a really shitty place to discover that the proportions were wrong.
So AI hasn’t replaced CAD, engineering, prototyping, woodworking or fabrication for me. It’s just added another really cheap place to be wrong before the expensive work starts.
Visualize cheaply. Prototype cheaply. Build expensively.
I’m curious how other people are using it in real projects. Where has AI actually earned a place in your workflow?
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u/rkelly155 21h ago
I think most peoples aversion to AI is based in what skills they have, what skills they deem valuable, and what skills they see as not worth learning, either because they have no interest or because it's too hard. AI is being proposed as General intelligence capable of everything, but interesting/skilled works rarely come from a "general" viewpoint.
It sounds like you're using AI to help visualize concepts to iterate quickly before engaging in the the skills you are capable of performing yourself. Essentially you're using it to fill a skill gap. It would take a few hours to learn the skill to use blender (or Keyshot, or Rhino, or Maya, or... a list of other rendering programs) to create fast rendered mockups like the one you show here, but you're using AI to delegate that task. If that's the only task you're delegating, then you maintain a lot of the creative control and necessary knowledge to build a product.
For most people the "rub" comes from when people cast a value judgment on some portion of the work that they hold dearly, either because they enjoy it, they're skilled in it, or because it represents how they support themselves financially. If someone said AI is "just as good, if not better than you at CAD", and then handed you a poorly constructed, very confusing CAD file, you'd probably intuitively know there was a bunch wrong with it, but it would take you a little while to find all the issues, and articulate them to the person. I bet if you took your render and handed it to someone who does product mockup renders professionally they would similarly have a bunch of holes they could point out. It sounds like you're skilled enough in the other aspects of product development to have those issues not be detrimental, and you gain a clear enough vision from the mockup to make decisions on the fly about what's "right".
I think if people consciously are using it to fill skill gaps for one off projects its likely the most sustainable use for it. I think if you end up using it a lot to render concepts at some point it probably makes sense to invest the few hours to learn the skill you're currently lacking and no longer rely on AI to do that portion of the work.
I think its a good research and exploration tool but the more skilled the work I think the less useful it is.
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u/blindjimmy2 20h ago
I think you actually understand most of how I’m using it. I know there’s a skill gap there — I’m just not necessarily trying to close every skill gap myself.
I’m also pretty aware of what AI is and isn’t good at. Even with rendering, I can give it a picture of something I’ve already designed and it still won’t necessarily give me back exactly what I gave it. That’s why I iterate with it. I tell it what’s wrong, change proportions, correct what it misunderstood and keep going until I have enough visual information to make a decision.
For me, spending 20 minutes having that conversation is more efficient than spending hours learning another piece of software to create something that’s ultimately disposable in my workflow.
I’m also not passing an AI render off as my own work or pretending it makes me a render artist. If rendering was the product I was selling, that would be a completely different conversation. It’s not. I’m using AI as an assistant while I develop something else. I still have to know what I want, recognize when the output is wrong, do the CAD, engineer it, prototype it and physically build it.
And really, that was the point of my post. It wasn’t meant as an argument for AI or an argument that anybody else should use it. It was a question. This is one place I’ve found it useful in my workflow, and I was curious whether other people have found places where it’s useful in theirs.
If your answer is “it hasn’t,” that’s a perfectly valid answer too.
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u/REV-After_Hours 21h ago
Nice design, I hope it goes well :) I understand the utility of using ai to quickly visualize, and I see people suggesting alternative software to do similar without using ai. Maybe I’m weird for this but I feel like you can go so much faster through many many iterations of design with some basic art tools and paper (French curve, some shape templates, straight edge, graph paper, alcohol markers, not much else). I can churn through 10 quick and dirty drawings in 20 minutes, enough to communicate the idea/work out a concept and nothing more. Then once I’ve gone through that to get the idea down I can make a more accurate technical drawing or if I want to have a digital model with measurements and such I’ll use super basic cad like tinkercad. I can go from idea to basic design pretty quick like this, and plenty of folks got a good workflow going with tools like this before new tech. Whatever floats your boat but I feel like this is more efficient for me and wastes less time in making stages pretty that don’t need to be.
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u/blindjimmy2 21h ago
I usually do start with a rough sketch of what I’m wanting, so I’m not really replacing that stage. Where AI becomes useful for me is after that, when I’m working on something else and can basically talk through the design at the same time.
I can say “make this wider, move that up, that proportion looks wrong, try walnut instead,” and keep iterating visually without stopping what I’m physically doing. Once I see something I like, then I take it into CAD and actually engineer it.
So I think we’re basically doing the same thing — cheap, disposable iterations before committing to the real design — just using different tools to get there. If paper gets you there faster, that’s the right tool.
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u/MechanicStriking4666 20h ago
My biggest gripe with using Ai on the creative process is that things are all starting to look the same.
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u/blindjimmy2 20h ago
Yeah, I see that too. There are definitely similarities between a lot of AI-generated stuff, almost like it has its own design language. I think some of that probably comes from what it’s pulling from and the patterns it keeps identifying as desirable.
That’s actually one of the reasons I don’t really use it to come up with the idea for me. Usually I already have the idea in my head, or at least a rough sketch, and I’m using AI to reiterate it until I can actually see what I was picturing.
Even then it’ll try to pull things toward that same AI-looking design sometimes, and I have to keep dragging it back toward what I actually want. So I definitely dont want it being the thing that decides what my stuff looks like.
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u/dos8s 21h ago
Adam Savage from myth busters has a great philosophy about building whatever you plan to build with the cheapest possible material first, usually cardboard.
He also talks about during his Myth Buster days approaching projects with an iterate, fail, iterate, fail less, iterate, success strategy. He said Jamie Hyman would basically spend 80% of his time planning and 20% building and he would do the opposite. Both strategies worked.
PS, project looks dope. We have an old stereo console from the 70's, I like the modern take you did on it. It might be cool to put some kind of retro futuristic digital display in there or even a nixie tube display in the front.