cadcraft

CADCraft is a from-scratch take on AutoCAD's 2D drafting workflow, written in Rust. You get the command line (type L, click two points), object snaps, layers, dimensions, hatches, blocks and paper-space layouts that plot to PDF. It's free under MIT or Apache-2.0, with builds for macOS, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and the browser.

Setup is a download from the releases page, or a Cargo build from source. A CLI and an MCP server let an AI agent type commands and render the drawing to check its own work. Fitting, since AI agents wrote most of it: the roadmap says the first 51,000 lines took about 11.5 agent-hours.

There's no paid tier. Solo hobbyists and students sketching 2D plans: free, worth a look. Small firms and larger teams exchanging drawings with clients: keep AutoCAD, or try LibreCAD if you need something free and stable today.

The catch: the project calls itself pre-alpha and puts itself at about 38% ready for real work. DWG is the format that matters, and a DWG saved here drops everything CADCraft doesn't model and has never been checked in AutoCAD. Open a file a client sent, sure. Don't send one back.