I just gave Fable 5.2 a shot at placing and routing a couple of circuit boards. I'm actually sure it would work fine for simpler/sparser designs but when the component density gets high enough, Fable spends too long struggling in the layer of the layout it's in rather than doing what a human would do, and intuiting that placement, or a component footprint, or different part choice altogether would enable the work to continue.
At first the work looked awesome, and once I started checking it out, I realized I would have to significantly alter the placements and manually draw most of the schematic to get it up to my standards (and hit the performance criteria of the board).
Yeah, I still expect to do a lot of manual work with this kind of thing. By "this kind of thing", I mean any kind of complex visual thing in SVG. I haven't tried any kind of 3D or circuit layout, yet, as it's just not something I do often, but if models could do it, I probably would do more of it...I have a 3D printer, but too slow at 3D modeling to ever want to do anything custom, and I do electronics projects occasionally, but have never had my own boards printed for the same reason. But, I would expect the capability of the models for 3D and circuits to trail SVG, simply because there's certainly less training data and 3D can be wildly more complicated than the average SVG.
It's surprisingly good but you have to have a bit of "theory of mind" to get what and why it can do graphical manipulations. Somehow Claude can draw 3D object wireframes but struggles to know where to draw the leader for a label in a diagram.
Also funny you should say you're too slow at 3D modeling but interested in using LLMs to do it. I'm on the other end. Not speed demon, but generally it's a lot faster to generate the geometry myself than to try to describe it. There's a lot of "how you got there" stuff that matters a ton for parametric modeling. If you want a CAD model that can easily be worked with you have got to be a bit smart about it, and I am not sure I see LLMs having that kind of spatial intelligence + deep physical world context soon. For one thing, it's a lot harder to do RL on.
