The ask
S&S is an engineering firm in Alpharetta, Georgia. Eight engineers, a robust building and fabrication operation, a highly capable front office. They design and build industrial skid systems and they are quite good at it.
They also have no draftsmen. Their engineers do both the engineering and the drafting.
The owner asked a simple question: can AI eliminate the part of this work that eats my engineers' time without using their judgment?
This is what we built.
How S&S works
S&S ships custom skid builds for industrial process work. Pipe assemblies, pumps, valves, instrumentation, all packaged on a steel frame and bolted together. Their engineers carry the work from quote through final fab drawings. Their fab operation builds it. Their front office runs the rest.
The flow:
- Customer comes with a process need
- S&S engineers quote the build
- Customer approves
- The same engineers go back into SolidWorks and produce the full drawing pack in the format the fab shop expects
That last step is where the time leaks. The engineers have already designed the system once. The drawing pack is the same design rendered a second time, spool by spool, dimension by dimension, callout by callout. It is repetitive, dexterity-demanding work that a senior engineer's time should not be paying for.
The big national mechanical firms hire dedicated draftsmen for this. Headcount, training, ongoing cost. Mid-tier shops buy expensive parametric tools that still don't catch the firm's specific conventions. S&S sat in a gap that generic tools don't fill.
How we approached it
Reverse-engineering S&S's drawing conventions was the bulk of the engineering work. The AI piece was straightforward. Those conventions lived in the senior engineer's reference drawings. Years of S&S work encoded in a handful of canonical examples. The first artifact the agent had to match was one of those references, which carried most of the firm's conventions in a single drawing.
The build:
- Picked the spool drawing as the smallest unit. One piping run, with isometrics, dimensions, weld callouts, and BOM.
- Drove SolidWorks through the API. Used
IView.GetVisibleEntities2(comp, 3)to pull view-scope faces, then placed parametric dimensions via face-to-face logic instead of guessing perpendicular axes. - Validated everything to 0.001 inches against the senior engineer's reference. Below the tolerance, accept. Above, debug.
- Iterated weekly with the senior engineer. The engineer who knew the conventions owned the spec. Claude wrote the code.
The output is a Claude Code agent that takes a parametric SolidWorks model and produces a multi-sheet drawing pack with spool drawings, isometrics, dimensions, BOM, and the firm's specific callouts. The engineer reviews, approves, and ships.
Where it landed
We solved the workflow. The agent produced a 12-sheet multi-spool drawing pack. 1,874 centerlines, 62 parametric dimensions, validated to 0.001 inches against the reference.
Then we trained S&S's internal operator on the methodology and handed it off. The agent is theirs to run, theirs to extend, theirs to expand into the next workflow they want to automate.
That was the goal from day one. S&S now runs the methodology without us. That is what makes the engagement worth doing.
Pricing
I had no idea if I could pull this off. Skid drafting is a specialized world and I'd never built a SolidWorks-driving agent before. So we settled on a simple deal: $100 an hour, capped at 20 hours, see where we land.
I finished the project in four working days. In hindsight, I wish I'd charged more. The work feels really valuable. But I'm super grateful S&S gave me the chance to try. I learned a ton.
For other engineering firms
If your senior engineers spend a real share of their time on parametric drafting, callout work, BOM extraction, or fab-ticket production, the same pattern applies. The firm-specific conventions are the hard part. The AI part is largely solved.
The shape of the engagement: a few days of methodology work with the senior engineer who owns the conventions, a working agent at the end, and a clean handoff to whoever you want running it.