Desktop development builds; physical-machine qualification remains.
A convincing toolpath on a screen is not a finished part. There is still a piece of material, a tool, a fixture and a person who has to understand what happens next. ForgeCAM is my attempt to make CNC preparation more guided and less dependent on remembering a collection of assumptions.
The foundation is Grid.Space’s open-source Kiri:Moto. That credit belongs up front. My work builds on it: improving setup, preserving work and making the path through a job clearer. The interesting question is what happens when someone returns to an unfinished job and no longer remembers why a setting was chosen.
That has pushed the work beyond adding controls. The interface needs to make the current setup understandable, help a person notice an assumption, and keep their work intact between sessions. A control that technically exists but is easy to misunderstand can make the process worse.
Preparing desktop builds brought a second lesson. Getting a feature to work on my computer and getting software ready for someone else are different jobs. Packaging and release checks belong to the product work; they are not clerical details to leave until the end.
Development builds exist. I am still separating what has been checked in software from what has been qualified on physical equipment. A successful build is evidence about the software. A successful cut needs its own evidence. That boundary is where this project becomes interesting to me: getting from a plausible digital result to something I can trust in the workshop.