Isenberg's 13-step playbook has AI write CAD as code
The hardware version of vibe coding, with two steps that exist purely to stop you burning money.
Greg Isenberg has published a 13-step workflow for designing and manufacturing physical products with AI, which he calls the vibe manufacturing playbook.
Pay an engineer for 1 hour. Before your first real order, have a mechanical engineer on Upwork etc review the files. It's the cheapest insurance you'll ever buy.
It starts with measurement. Digital calipers for small parts, a phone LiDAR app like Polycam for a space or an object, because in his telling bad measurements are the number one reason first builds fail. Step two is the interesting one for anyone who already lives in a terminal. Describe the part to a frontier model like Claude Opus 5.5 or Astra and have it write the design in a code based CAD tool such as OpenSCAD or CadQuery. Zoo's Text to CAD does it in one step.
From there it is about files factories can actually read. STEP for machined parts, DXF for laser cut metal, STL for 3D printing. Isenberg warns that the text to 3D models on Hugging Face produce shapes that look right but are not precise enough to manufacture. He also suggests asking the model to check the design against real factory constraints, how tight metal can bend, how small a hole can be, how much clearance parts need.
The two steps that save money
Prototype in plastic first. A $300 to $600 home 3D printer like a Bambu Lab lets you test fit overnight before you pay for metal. Then, before the first real order, hire a mechanical engineer on Upwork for one hour to review the files.
Only then does the work go out. SendCutSend cuts and bends metal, Xometry and Protolabs handle machining and plastic, JLCPCB builds circuit boards, and Isenberg says quotes are instant and parts usually ship in days. For smart features he points at the ESP32 wifi chip, KiCad for the board and ESPHome for phone control.
The back half is business, not CAD. Order one unit and fix what is wrong. Add up parts, finishing, assembly, packaging and shipping, and price for healthy margins, because custom products are hard to resell. Sell the design and manufacture only after a customer pays. Safety certification, he argues, is slow and annoying and therefore a moat.
The business read. Nikita Bier says he vibe-fabricated a wifi-locked dog door to his house's specs, knowing nothing about metal fabrication, and that it is being manufactured and delivered in two weeks for almost the same cost as an off-the-shelf item. That is one person, one object, no sale. Nobody in these posts has shown a margin yet.
I vibe-fabricated a dog door with a wifi-controlled lock, perfectly to the specifications & design of my house.