I saw some people at a company called Pruna AI got it down to 8 seconds with Cloudflare/Replicate, but I don't know if it was on consumer hardware or an A100/H100/H200, and I don't know if the inference optimization is open-source yet.
VS Code feels like nothing but bloat. Sublime Text is still my go-to, as I'm not very well-versed in Neovim yet. I'm also really digging the new C/Lua-based Lite XL - https://lite-xl.com. One of my New Year's resolutions is to learn Neovim properly.
Try Zed. Open-source (GPL+Apache), reliable, fast, not bloated at all, decently configurable, amazing remote-host support, Vim mode, AI stuff totally optional, extensions/lang-servers available for many languages, and... well overall I find it very neat and polished!
(I'm not associated with Zed, just a happy user looking to share the goodness.)
I'm working on an affordable SaaS platform for small and mid-sized fabrication shops across the US and Canada. It automates quoting and production for sheet-metal and CNC jobs and can handle pretty much any CAD format, even full assemblies. On the AI side, we've got a mix of models doing the heavy lifting: a tuned geometric transformer for feature detection, a graph neural net for topology, and a vision model for mesh segmentation. All that ties into our custom CAD logic for geometry parsing, 2D nesting for laser/machining, and 3D nesting for forming and packaging. The whole idea is to level the playing field so smaller local shops can compete with the big instant-quote guys without needing an in-house dev team.
I can't tell how you allow the small shops to make instant-quotes. Is it because they can instantly visualize the part? Or do you process the customer's design and provide the shop additional information that helps them do this? Or are you just generating the final quote itself already based on what you know about the shop and the customer design?
Good question! Right now we’re starting with the sheet metal side of things: laser cutting, forming, welding, surface finishing, and final touches like anodizing, powder coat, or just a clean mill finish. The platform takes the customer’s CAD file, runs DFM checks, figures out material usage, laser time, bend complexity, and weld length, then instantly generates a production-ready quote based on each shop’s own pricing and capabilities. This quote includes delivery cost + an estimated time you can expect the part. There’s 2D and 3D visualization built in, but the real magic is the drag-and-drop, get-an-instant-quote experience. The reality is, most fab shops are still painfully slow when it comes to quoting. Even in 2025 it’s not unusual to wait a week (or three) just to hear back. That’s the gap we’re closing.
Very interesting. The big followup question is to ask is: Currently shops spend X% of their time creating quotes and talking to incoming customers, and (100-X)% time actually doing the work. What is X% for a typical shop and how much are you hoping to reduce it to?
Based on industry data and first-hand experience, most small to mid-sized fabrication shops spend 25–40% of their total time on quoting-related activities: reviewing customer drawings, clarifying requirements, preparing cost breakdowns, and going back and forth over email or phone. In some job shops with limited staff, quoting can even eat up half a workweek for the owner or lead estimator.
Our goal is to bring that number down to under 5% by automating geometry analysis, material costing, and lead-time estimation. Essentially turning what used to take days (or weeks) into an instant, self-service process for customers. That frees up the shop to spend the remaining 95%+ of their time doing what actually makes money: fabricating parts.
No, we aren’t using any CAD software for this since we’re not trying to be in the design space ourselves. Instead, we’re using libraries like OpenCascade’s Mesh Toolkit to read and tessellate CAD files into a hybrid 3D format optimized for web rendering, while preserving precise geometry, topology, and manufacturing data.
Is is essentially a SaaS version of what businesses like OSH Cut and SendCutSend have built? And are you doing just the quoting, or full shop management?
That's exactly what it is. But instead of keeping it as some proprietary tool for one shop, our goal is to make that same tech accessible and affordable for all shops. Not every fab shop is tech-first, and that's totally fine. We're building something that helps them compete without needing a full-time developer or a six-figure software budget.
As for your last question, we're not trying to replace any existing ERP or CRM systems. We're focused on delivering instant, accurate quotations through our own turnkey pricing model that helps job shops stay competitive day-to-day, manage payments seamlessly, and give customers real-time shipping options or an easy Will Call pickup if they're local.
I’d rather mitigate a DDoS attack on my own servers than deal with Cloudflare. Having to prove you’re human is the second-worst thing on my list, right after accepting cookies. Those two things alone have made browsing the web a worse experience than it was in the late 90s or early 2000s.
There's worse than having to prove (over and over and over again) that you are human: having your IP just completely blocked by Cloudflare zealous bot-filtering (and I use a plain mass market ISP in a developed country and not some shady network)
Alright kids, breathe...a DDoS attack isn't the end of the world, it's just the internet throwing a tantrum. If you really don't want to use a fancy protection provider, you can still act like a grown-up: get your datacenter to filter trash at the edge, announce a more specific prefix with BGP so you can shift traffic, drop junk with strict ACLs, and turn on basic rate limiting so bots get bored. You can also tune your kernel so it doesn't faint at SYN storms, and if the firehose gets too big, pop out a more specific BGP prefix from a backup path or secondary router so you can pull production away from the burning IP.
Very quickly you'll find this doesn't work. Your DC will just null your IP. You'll switch to a new one and the attackers will too, the DC will null that one. You won't win at this game unless you're a very sizeable organization or are just willing to wait the attackers out, they will get bored eventually.
> pop out a more specific BGP prefix from a backup path or secondary router so you can pull production away from the burning IP.
This won't help against carpet bombing.
The only workable solution for enterprises is a combination of on-prem and cloud mitigation. Cloud to get all the big swaths of mitigation and to keep your pipe flowing, and on-prem to mitigate specific attack vectors like state exhaustion.
Worrying about a DDoS on your tiny setup is like a brand-new dev stressing over how they'll handle a billion requests per second...cute, but not exactly a real-world problem for 99.99% of you. It's one of those internet boogeyman myths people love to panic about.
As much as this situation sucks, how do you plan to "mitigate a DDoS attack on my own servers". The reason I use Cloudflare is to use it as a proxy especially for DDOS attacks if they do occur. Right now, our services are down and we are getting tons of customer support tickets (like everyone else) but it is a lot easier to explain the the whole world is down vs its just us.
DateTime handling, especially with timezone offsets, is crucial. If your format gets that right, it'll stand out...most formats still mess up time zones or rely on loose string parsing. It's key for stuff like logs, scheduling, or syncing data across systems. DuperGZ right after that! ;)
Nice! Are you using any specific canvas libraries for this, like KonvaJS? I recently worked on a closed-source project that used Konva and was pretty impressed with its capabilities. HTML canvas is powerful stuff if you know what you're doing.
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