Hardware Podcasts

The Oxide 3D Explorer

Oxide and Friends · 27 Jun 2026 · 1h 14m · Episode 15

AI in practice: 3 real uses of AI described

What this episode covers

Ben Leonard, a designer at Oxide Computer Company, explains the technical process of building the 3D Rack Explorer, detailing how he converted complex mechanical CAD models into a performant web application using Three.js and React Three Fiber. The team discusses the manual effort required to reduce polygon counts and manage levels of detail for components like the Cosmo compute sled and Sidecar switch, ensuring the interactive site runs smoothly across different devices. They also highlight the tool's potential for customer support and internal training, as well as its open-source nature, inviting community contributions via pull requests.

AI in practice

Where this conversation describes AI being used to build or deliver a product. Part of the AI in practice tracker.

DesignClaude

The designer used Claude to analyze GLB/GLTF model formats and debug material naming or export setup issues when the 3D model was not rendering correctly.

“not to, not to ring the kind of LLM bell too early, but, they use this stuff you can poke, you can feed into Claude and be like, okay, trying to do this and it's not working. Can peruse the model format and say, okay. Your your your material naming is wrong or the way that this is this export setup is wrong.”

Ben Leonard · Hear it at 22:44

DesignClaude

The designer used a Claude skill focused on web animation principles to optimize camera interpolation in the 3D canvas, specifically applying insights about frame-rate independence and distance-scaled animation duration.

“I had I had a kind of a Claude skill installed that applied specifically to web animation principles. Yeah. And and bear in mind, this is designed for, I don't like animating a modal or a drop down or something like that. I But was interested to see how deal it with applying those same principles to a three d canvas.”

Ben Leonard · Hear it at 52:42

Engineering & simulationClaude

The designer used Claude to write a performance harness that tests rendering performance via URL prompts, saves results to JSON, and uses the LLM to compare test outputs to identify optimizations and avoid regressions.

“Funny enough, so I got Claude to write a performance harness. And what it does is you add like a and this is the thing because I have all sorts of theories about ways in which to make it faster and Claude does too. And like the way in which we test this is there's a, you…”

Ben Leonard · Hear it at 58:35

Most relevant to

early-stage companies

Topics

Mentioned

Companies
Oxide Computer Company
Products
Cosmo, Sidecar
Tools
Three.js, React Three Fiber, Altium, Cadence OrCAD, SolidWorks, Claude
Also
Pierre Lamond

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