The Shape of Things to Come

I recently bought my family our first 3D printer and I am blown away by the technology.

I know that 3D printing isn’t a new technology - it’s been around for decades, and consumer-grade 3D printers have been available on the market for several years at this point. I’m actually late to the game here.

But I can’t help but be amazed at this piece of technology. It’s a frickin’ real-life replicator!

Of course, after printing my first few doodads and dongles from Bambu’s extensive MakerWorld catalog, my mind immediately pivoted to another modern consumer technology that I am certainly not a late adopter of: AI.

There’s no reason I couldn’t create my own designs. If I can imagine it, why shouldn’t I be able to print it? Except that I have zero CAD experience. But it’s 2026! Any CAD software is just one representation of bytes on a computer - bytes that a properly instructed AI agent can tweak and tune at my discretion.

After a few short hours of playing around, I’ve got a rough workflow: I chat with Pi, which programmatically uses OpenSCAD or Blender to create actual three-dimensional designs, then exports them to Bambu Studio as 3MF files. From there, I can send them to my replicator and hold the results in my hands within hours.

Again, mind-blowing.

The fact that it was so trivial for me to compose these various tools and turn nearly anything I can dream up into reality is nothing short of miraculous. It’s simply incredible how accessible all of this stuff really is. The dream-to-reality pipeline is getting shorter by the day. To quote the Zuck: The Future Is for Everyone.