Benchmark: CadQuery vs. OpenSCAD for agentic CAD work

ModelRift compared OpenSCAD and CadQuery for AI-driven CAD work by having Claude Opus agents complete three design tasks with each tool, finding both capable of producing printable parts but differing significantly in failure modes. All six resulting models passed geometry validation, though CadQuery required a custom offscreen renderer since it lacks CLI capabilities that OpenSCAD provides natively. The study revealed capability was not the distinguishing factor—instead, how each tool fails and provides feedback to the AI agent proved to be the meaningful difference.