Agentic CNC

I reckon LLM agents can control CNC machines, and I reckon this already works today although I don't know if anyone is doing it yet.

For annoying reasons I don't currently have any computer that has access to a CNC machine and the internet simultaneously so I can't immediately try this out but it would be good to experiment with.

You could have a really simple AGENTS.md describing how to connect to FluidNC or whatever and parameters for the machine it's controlling, and then you could do simple CNC jobs without doing any CAD or CAM.

You'd still have to load material yourself and probably set up the work coordinates appropriately using a normal gcode sender, but then you can just ask for what you want:

Hi codex, I have a workpiece loaded in the plasma cutter, it is 6mm thick steel, I've setup the coordinate system already, and I want a slot for an M6 bolt to slide between centres at X0Y0 and X20Y0, go

For extra style points, have codex connected up to voice control.

I am almost 100% confident that codex could correctly write the gcode on the first try and successfully send it to FluidNC and run the job. (For the doubters, here's , note I haven't used a CNC plasma cutter in my life so the cutting parmeters are bogus). You may find it is reluctant to run a real machine without several rounds of confirmation, I don't know, but in any event this could probably be fixed in AGENTS.md by explaining to it that you really do want it to run your machine.

For the plasma cutter example I think you'd just want AGENTS.md to tell it things like:

• whether to talk to FluidNC over serial or TCP or something else
• some examples of good values for pierce time, feed rate, and kerf width for different metals and thicknesses

I think if you had an example for 4mm steel and one for 6mm steel it would probably do a perfectly adequate job of interpolating parameters to handle 5mm steel for example.

You can imagine if the machine table had a referenced XY zero position like a scanner bed does then you could always load material referenced to the same point and you wouldn't have to do any coordinate setup. Especially on a plasma cutter or laser cutter where you don't have clamps in the way that need to be avoided during travel moves.

For a milling machine you'd also want to either give it an automated tool changer, and information about which tool is in which slot, etc., which is not at all unusual for machines that have such capability; or else for a basic 3 axis machine you'd have to just tell it what tool you've loaded and set the Z height yourself.