Raven AI: The Future Is In The Spaghetti

CDFAM Computational Design Symposium — Barcelona 2026

Moritz Rietschel · Raven

Twenty years of community-built Grasshopper infrastructure, decades of firm knowledge, scattered documentation, and forum posts that solved your problem in 2011.

The problem has never been capability - it has been access.

Raven is a code agent for Grasshopper that works across 900+ plugins through the native API. Rather than replacing existing tools, it functions as an infrastructure layer: connecting users to what was already there.

Moritz Rietschel walks through what it actually takes to build AI that works with CAD. How do you fit 3D geometry and graph logic into a 1D token stream? How do you handle the points where an LLM's assumptions and Rhino's reality diverge? Why do reasoning models sometimes spiral without producing anything useful, and what guardrails keep them on track? He also addresses how Raven draws from both public knowledge and firm-specific context, and what it means to design for recombination when every project demands a unique plugin assembly and every user has a globally unique Grasshopper setup.

This is a technical account of building AI infrastructure for creative engineering workflows - what breaks, what surprised the team, and how they are thinking about AI within existing ecosystems rather than as a replacement for them.

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