Musa CAD Wiki · Blog

Drawings without drafting: an AI pipeline on top of Musa CAD

Fri, 23 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Making fabrication drawings is slow, careful work. Every part needs its views, a section, dimensions, tolerances, notes and a filled-in title block, and every sheet has to be checked before it goes to the workshop. I wanted to see how much of that an AI agent could do, if the CAD program was built to be driven by one.

The result is the fabrication pipeline. It takes 3D models of parts and assemblies from FreeCAD and produces print-ready A4 drawings on a company title block, with no hand drafting.

Why Musa CAD makes this possible

Three things in Musa CAD do the heavy lifting:

A drawing is plain text. The pipeline writes every sheet as a .musa file, one record per line. There is no binary format to reverse-engineer and no plug-in to install.
Musa CAD’s reader is strict. A wrong record stops the whole file, with the line number. An agent gets a clear error instead of a drawing that is quietly wrong.
Printing needs no window. Every sheet is plotted to PDF through the same code the program uses, on a machine with no screen.

A person stays in charge

The agent does the work, and a person makes the decisions. After it analyses the models and judges whether they are ready to be made, the pipeline stops until someone approves. Then it asks, one question at a time, how each part should be drawn: which view to show, where to cut the section, which tolerances to use.

Only then does it draw. Every annotation is placed by a layout engine that refuses to let text or dimensions overlap. If a sheet cannot be laid out cleanly, it fails loudly instead of being shipped. A final check renders every PDF to an image and goes through a list of points, from paper size and scale to the title block, before anything is called done.

What it taught me about Musa CAD

Every time the pipeline needed something Musa CAD could not do, it went in as an issue on the Musa CAD repository. Building a demanding user of the program on top of it is one of the best ways to find out what it is missing, and to fix it where real drawings need it.

Try it yourself

You do not need the whole pipeline to start. The AI workflows page shows the four things an agent needs, and Drawings from code has a short program you can run today.

Pranay

Welcome to the Musa CAD Wiki

Fri, 23 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Until today, Musa CAD’s documentation lived in Markdown files in the source repository. They were accurate, but they were written for the people building Musa CAD, not for the people drawing with it. This wiki is for you, the person drawing.

What is here

Get started: installing Musa CAD on Windows, Linux and macOS, your first drawing step by step, a tour of the window, and a page for everyone coming from AutoCAD.
A page for every command and setting. All 394 of them, with how to type it, where it is on the ribbon, what it asks first, and the release it arrived in.
Dynamic Input, explained properly. Typing at the cursor is what sets Musa CAD apart from other 2D CAD programs.
Scripting and automation: how programs and AI agents make finished drawings with Musa CAD.
This blog, for releases and longer write-ups.

How it keeps up

Musa CAD has had eight releases in four months. Documentation written by hand falls behind at that pace, so the wiki does not depend on anyone remembering to update it.

The command and settings pages, the keyboard shortcuts and the ribbon map are read from Musa CAD itself every time the wiki is built. If a command is added or moved, its page follows.
The pictures of drawings are printed by Musa CAD while the wiki is built, from example files you can download. If a release ever broke an example, the wiki would refuse to build until it was fixed.
Every page says which release it was checked against, and whether it is complete, partial or not written yet. If a page falls behind, it says so at the top.

What is still to come

Most command pages show only what Musa CAD reports about the command. The explanations are being written now, starting with the commands you use every day. The user manual and the tutorials follow. Each page tells you honestly how far it has got.

How you can help

Every page has two links at the bottom: Edit page and Report a problem with this page. If something is wrong, unclear or missing, tell me. That is the fastest way to make this wiki better for the next person.

Pranay

Musa CAD 0.8.0 is out

Thu, 22 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Musa CAD 0.8.0 is the biggest release so far. It is about what goes into a drawing: the order things are drawn in, transparency, multilines, hatches and dimensions that follow their objects, multileader styles, the Block Editor, linked tables, and plotting whole sets.

Get it

Linux: the AppImage and the Flatpak file are on the release page, and Flathub has it too.
macOS: the disk image is on the release page. As before, the command line works but the drawing area does not open yet.
Windows: the installer follows once it has been tested on a real Windows PC. When it is ready, an installed 0.7.0 offers the update by itself.

About your files: the drawing format moved from version 39 to 45. Drawings from 0.7.0 open unchanged. Drawings saved by 0.8.0 need 0.8.0 or newer.

What is new

Draw order, transparency and ByBlock. Every object has a place in the draw order. DRAWORDER brings objects to the front or sends them back, and TEXTTOFRONT and HATCHTOBACK do it for all text or all hatches at once. Objects can have their own transparency, and blocks can pass their colour, linetype and lineweight to the objects inside them (ByBlock).
Drawing. Multilines with MLINE, MLSTYLE and MLEDIT. Splines keep the points they were drawn through. PEDIT Spline works as AutoCAD’s does. Wipeouts are proper objects, and DXF wipeouts now come in.
Hatches follow their boundaries, use AutoCAD’s standard patterns and .pat files, and can be edited with HATCHEDIT.
Dimensions follow the objects they measure, and the Dimension Style Manager gained tolerances, alternate units and more. New: DIMBREAK, DIMJOGLINE and DIMINSPECT.
Multileaders with styles. Change a style and every multileader drawn with it follows.
Blocks: the Block Editor (BEDIT), BLOCKREPLACE, ATTSYNC and BASE.
Text, fields, tables and data: links from tables to CSV and Excel files, data extraction and table export.
Layers: layer states, filters, LAYERP, LAYMRG, LAYDEL and LAYWALK.
Output: PREVIEW, EXPORTPDF and PUBLISH for whole sets, and a page setup for each layout.
Drafting aids: Dynamic Input’s pointer input and option list, feet and inches at every prompt, and grip dimensions.
The interface: the View Manager, tool palettes, workspaces, and keyboard shortcuts and aliases of your own.
Express Tools: TEXTMASK, TXTEXP, TCOUNT, TEXTFIT, BURST, GATTE, EXTRIM, NCOPY, MOCORO, FLATTEN, VPSYNC, VPSCALE, XLIST, ATTOUT, ATTIN, MPEDIT, DIMEX, DIMIM and TFRAMES.

Every one of these commands has a page in the command reference, and the full list of changes is in the release notes.

Pranay