The single most common thing SolidWorks users do is also one of the slowest: small parametric tweaks. Bump a wall thickness. Add a fillet. Change a bore from 10 mm to 12 mm. Each one is two minutes of clicking through the FeatureManager, and most parts need dozens of them.
CADABRA's natural-language editor exists to collapse that loop. You type what you want; CADABRA performs the corresponding operation against the active model. No menu hunting, no remembering which feature lives under which configuration.
What "edit in plain English" actually means
Behind the scenes, every prompt resolves to a concrete SolidWorks operation, a sketch edit, a feature modification, a configuration change, a dimension override. CADABRA reads the open model, identifies the entities you're referring to, and applies the edit. A few examples that work today:
- Dimensional tweaks, "Increase the wall thickness from 2 mm to 3 mm."
- Local geometry edits, "Add a 1 mm fillet to all sharp edges on the top face."
- Hole and bore changes, "Change the through-hole on the bracket to Ø12 with an M12 tapped hole."
- Feature toggling, "Suppress the chamfer on the back edge for the lightweight configuration."
- Pattern updates, "Make the bolt pattern 6 holes evenly spaced on the bolt circle."
Why this is faster than the FeatureManager
Three reasons, in order of impact:
- You skip the disambiguation. SolidWorks asks you to point at a face, an edge, a sketch, a feature. Most of the time you already know which one, you just don't want to scroll the tree to find it. CADABRA accepts the description ("the back face", "the M6 hole on the flange") and resolves it from context.
- You skip the dialog round-trips. One sentence replaces feature dialog → preview → OK → rebuild for each change.
- You can chain edits. "Make all internal fillets 2 mm and external fillets 1 mm, then rebuild." A single prompt, one rebuild.
Tips for getting clean results
The model is a senior SolidWorks user, not a mind reader. A few patterns that work well in practice:
Anchor to something specific
"The Ø8 hole on the mounting tab" is much better than "the hole". If the model has a dozen holes, name a property that uniquely identifies the one you mean, diameter, location, the feature it lives on, the face it's on.
Use units
Always include units (mm, in, mm/sec, deg). It removes any ambiguity between the model's units and what you intend.
One intent per sentence, but chain freely
You can ask for a sequence, "add a 2 mm fillet to the inner edge, then mirror the rib feature across the YZ plane", and CADABRA will execute them in order. What you should avoid is conflating two different intents into a single ambiguous sentence.
Keep destructive operations explicit
"Delete the chamfer" deletes the feature. "Suppress the chamfer" turns it off. Both are valid; CADABRA does what you say. If you're not sure which you want, suppress first, it's reversible.
Where this is going
The natural-language editor is the foundation for the rest of CADABRA's automation. Once you can describe a change in one sentence, you can describe a checklist of changes, or a design intent that propagates across configurations. The drawing automation (covered in Auto-generate engineering drawings) and Ask Mode (covered in Ask Mode: a SolidWorks expert that knows your model) both build on the same underlying understanding of your model.
If you want to see it run against your own part, book a 20-minute demo, bring a file, we'll edit it live.