Thanks for the input! Haven't done much with Altium but it seems like you get at least somewhat of a boost for it being slightly more about the logic and less about the spatial reasoning.
2 things related to what you said I hadn't put in the original post:
1. In our experience, the LLMs were awful at taking actions directly with any of the SolidWorks API scripting formats (C#, VBA, etc.). Probably 75% of what they wrote just failed to run, and even when they had access to browse the documentation it wasn't much better. If you're getting Opus or anything else to interact with SolidWorks from the CLI, can you say more about how you're getting it to interface effectively?
2. The LLMs are indeed surprisingly bad at spatial reasoning unless prompted specifically and individually. The most notable case of this is when they need to choose the right plane to sketch on. When creating revolve features, they'll often choose the face that would've only worked if they were going to extrude rather than revolve, and when creating sweeps they'll often try to put the sketch that's going to be swept on the same plane as the path that's being swept. If you go back and ask them why they did that and point out that it's wrong, they can fix it pretty fast, but when left to their own devices they often get quite stuck on this.
2 things related to what you said I hadn't put in the original post:
1. In our experience, the LLMs were awful at taking actions directly with any of the SolidWorks API scripting formats (C#, VBA, etc.). Probably 75% of what they wrote just failed to run, and even when they had access to browse the documentation it wasn't much better. If you're getting Opus or anything else to interact with SolidWorks from the CLI, can you say more about how you're getting it to interface effectively?
2. The LLMs are indeed surprisingly bad at spatial reasoning unless prompted specifically and individually. The most notable case of this is when they need to choose the right plane to sketch on. When creating revolve features, they'll often choose the face that would've only worked if they were going to extrude rather than revolve, and when creating sweeps they'll often try to put the sketch that's going to be swept on the same plane as the path that's being swept. If you go back and ask them why they did that and point out that it's wrong, they can fix it pretty fast, but when left to their own devices they often get quite stuck on this.