Ask for a frame, cut what fits

A workshop types a request into Claude: a 4 by 4 metre timber watchtower that looks like a flower. The answer comes back with a drawing of the frame and a link. Opening the link puts the project in Kerf's fitting view, where it can be checked, adjusted and sent to the saw.

That is the largest change to Kerf this week. Two others matter as much to anyone who sends files to a machine: exports that refuse to quietly lose a cut, and joints that say when two members occupy the same timber.

Connect an assistant once

Kerf now works as a connector for Claude and ChatGPT. Add it as a custom connector in the assistant's settings. The assistant opens a Kerf page asking for permission: sign in with the usual email link, check which app is asking, and choose Allow.

From then on the assistant can create a project, change it in batches, check it and draw it. Its answers include an image of the views it rendered and a link that opens the project in Kerf.

The assistant works on that account's cloud projects and nothing else. It cannot delete a project, change who a project is shared with, or reach another account. If someone edits the same project in Kerf while the assistant is working, the assistant is told about the conflict and reads the project again before it retries.

The model runs on the user's own Claude or ChatGPT plan. Custom connectors need a Claude plan that offers them, or ChatGPT's developer mode.

Kerf itself is in trials, open to workshops rather than to everyone, and the connector works on a trial account.

Held to the same checks as a drawing by hand

Every change an assistant makes goes through the same fitting and validation as a frame drawn in Kerf. When a joint does not close, the report names both parts, the end, the distance and the rule, and often proposes a fix the assistant can apply in one step.

Machine files are not made by the assistant. They are exported in Kerf, after a person has looked at the frame.

Exports that say what they would lose

Kerf writes BTLx, Hundegger BVN and Hundegger BVX. Not every format can carry every end shape. BVX has no way to write an end cut made of two planes, and until this week a part with one left at full length with a square end and a small amber note.

Export now refuses. The panel turns red, lists the parts whose ends would come out square, and writes no file. A separate tick box lets the user go ahead anyway, as a statement that those ends will be finished by hand, and the export still lists per part what the format could not carry.

Import reaches further back as well. Kerf reads BTLx from version 1.0 up to 2.3.1, as a plain file or as a zipped .btlz, and writes 2.0.0 or 2.3.1 on export. Laps, dovetail sockets and step joints come in as joints that can be edited and drawn in their common forms. Unusual variants are kept exactly as they arrived.

Crowded joints, in millimetres

Where five or six members meet at one point, each arriving end gets one cut against one face. Sometimes that leaves two members sharing the same timber, and Kerf did not say so.

The node panel now lists every overlapping pair with the millimetres involved, and each affected member carries a marker in the 3D view. Next to that list sit the controls that can change it.

At any corner, including a plain two-member corner, the user can choose which member runs through, instead of a mitre.

Each end can be trimmed by hand in millimetres. The length moves by exactly the number typed, and the angle of the machine cut stays the same.

An overlap can be accepted for one pair. Its warning leaves the issue list, but the tech-spec PDF and the part's own panel still say that end is cut by hand. Every other pair at that node keeps warning.

For how Kerf sits alongside the foundry's other products, see What the foundry's products do.