Blog
AI agents, automation and judgment inside Autodesk products: Vault, Inventor, AutoCAD and Forma. What I build and what I learn, no hype.
The checklist before automating anything
Automating chaos only produces faster chaos: the five questions and the formula that decide what deserves automation and what does not.
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+200%: what sits behind that recommendation
From Applications Engineer to presales that diagnoses: the unglamorous work behind a number a client made public.
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Every write is a claim: the read-back is the proof
An API can return success without persisting the change. Twenty-three times the read-back caught it, and that is why there are nine gates and not one.
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My agent refuses to do certain things (and that is a feature)
Every refusal from the agent is an incident that never happened: the right question is not what your agent can do, but what it refuses to do.
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Which workflow do you automate first: the arithmetic that includes risk
Frequency times minutes times people, divided by effort and risk. In a PDM with no bulk undo, risk is the term that decides.
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ISO 19650 in practice: naming and attributes people actually fill in
The name identifies, the metadata filters: the standard that survives is the one living in the CDE configuration, not in a PDF.
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Parametric assemblies from natural language: what is real and what is hype
I built an assistant that generates assemblies from a chat inside Inventor. This is what AI really does in CAD today, and what is still just a demo.
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Autonomous does not mean no human: the four verbs of an agent loop
Advertise, call, return and the gate. The protocol gives you three verbs; you write the fourth, and it is the one that decides whether the agent is safe.
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MFG3731 Vault on Autopilot: my session at Autodesk University 2026
Thursday September 17, 4:30 PM, Las Vegas. A 60 minute Technical Deep Dive: what AU is, what I am bringing to the stage and what there will not be.
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The star template: a CDE born correctly configured
Projects are not configured, they are born configured: folders, permissions, roles and ISO 19650 validated, from test hub to source of truth.
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From Vault to Forma: what travels and what does not
Moving files is the easy part. States, properties, BOM and permissions need a bridge with dry-run, schema validation and audit.
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One agent, three surfaces: Vault, AutoCAD and Inventor
The agent has to go where people work, not the other way around: one logic and the same 9 safety layers in Vault Client, AutoCAD and Inventor.
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Why LLMs invent Vault properties (and how to fix it)
An LLM completes patterns: that is why it offers properties your Vault never had. The fix is not a better prompt, it is validating against the real schema.
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Starting to build in Revit (and documenting it in public)
Years on the manufacturing side. Today I open the BIM front with no fake expertise: the same recipe of API, automation and limits, documented in public.
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Anatomy of a PDM agent: 28 tools across 9 categories
The chat is just the front door. What defines an agent is its inventory of tools and the limits that govern every single one.
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Exporting the full Content Center to Excel: zero AI, days of work saved
This add-in does not contain a single prompt. And it is one of the projects that best explains how I decide when to use AI and when not to.
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AI will not replace the CAD engineer. It will replace their 3 hours of clicking
When I say this in a meeting the same thing always happens: first silence, then someone starts making the list of tasks nobody wants to do.
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The pre-release audit: 217 components in seconds, not 20 minutes
The manual audit of a 217-component assembly took about 20 minutes. Today it takes seconds. And speed is only half of the story.
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Anti-hype checklist: 7 questions before buying "AI for engineering"
"AI for engineering" is the buzzword of the year. And a good part of what gets sold under that label does not survive 7 questions.
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What is MCP and why it changes how we talk to CAD software
Asking Inventor for an assembly in plain language is no longer science fiction. And the key piece has a name: MCP.
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AI agents on your credentials, not on an admin account
The most common security mistake in an AI agent is not in the model. It is in the permissions it runs with.
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Not everything needs AI: the 3-question framework I use before automating
One of the projects I'm most proud of doesn't have a single line of AI in it. And that's exactly why it works.
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From chat to CAD: the 3-layer architecture behind a design assistant you can trust
You can't just plug ChatGPT into Inventor and hope for the best. What actually works is a 3-layer architecture where the LLM never touches the CAD API.
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VaultPilot's 9 defense layers: an agent that writes to your PDM cannot improvise
I built an AI agent with write access to Autodesk Vault in production. And the first thing I designed wasn't what it does. It was what it cannot do.
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AI is not the promise. It is the means.
"Can you build me an AI agent?" is the question I get the most. I almost always answer with another one: what problem are you actually trying to solve?
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