Natural Language -> 3D Printed Outlet Cover

July 30, 2026

The original broken outlet cover
The broken original
The blue 3D-printed replacement outlet cover installed on the metal box
The installed 3D-printed replacement

Some outlets in my garage had outlet covers too wide, and i managed to break them walking by. This ended up being a great opportunity to test CAD AI agent skills (this was using Opus 5). I described what i wanted in natural langauge, and ended up with an STL that I could 3D print. Originally, I tried to get my LLM directly connected to my bambu 3D printer and sending raw gcode, and while it was technically possible I found slicing via CLI to be unnecessarily complicated. If I can get the STL, that’s 90% of the work and I can slice it and print it myself.

A second blue 3D-printed cover installed around two wall switches A second finished cover for the adjacent switches

Real world context

Just photographing calipers in context gives the LLM a ton of useful context and precise measurements for the prototype.

Calipers reading 95.13 mm Calipers reading 12.57 mm Rear view showing the 16 mm skirt Final CAD front view

Things are changing fast

This was done in July 2026 and the new models out in September (GPT 5.6 Astra and Fable 1.1) are already both radically more capable at 3D CAD work like this. It’s pretty nuts.