11 Thing I Hate About AutoCAD® - Frustration

I love CAD, I’ve worked with it my whole adult life. Whilst it normally brings me joy, there are some things I find frustrating about AutoCAD^®. In this post, I’m going to share 11 of the things I hate about AutoCAD. I’m sure you’ll agree.

1 The AutoCAD Learning Curve – Why Beginners Quit Before They Even Start

For me, CAD is just fun "computer game", one I want everyone else to play too, but the barrier to entry as a beginner, is one of the biggest things I hate about AutoCAD.

When I first started seriously using CAD (Rhino 2009), I remember hours of screaming at the computer and chain-smoking, whilst furiously trying to navigate hundreds of commands with strange names I could never remember, and manipulate points in a three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional screen. I know there are some competitor CAD systems that have put time and effort into improving UI/UX (how easy the programme is to actually use), however, AutoCAD has made no effort at all to make users' lives easier!

In fact, Autodesk^® has turned this frustration point into a lucrative business model.

“Are you a certified AutoCAD user?”

“Make sure you pay us for officially licensed training.” 🤑

Whilst it’s perfectly possible to follow many fantastic free online tutorials, inevitably there will be stumbling points where you’ll either need help to fix the issue, or be stuck scrolling through the forums to try and work out how you accidentally turned off snap tracking and why it just won’t come back.

Then it crashes, and you forgot to save. ARGH!

2 Too Many Ways to Do Simple Things – The Confusing Maze of AutoCAD Frustrations

I once counted 11 different ways to draw a square in DWG and I know there are yet more. Whilst some might claim that this is a great thing, it can make it impossible for new users to come to AutoCAD for the first time, and harder still to optimise work.

As my old boss used to say:

If you inherit a block library, good luck! Sometimes even I can’t work out how I made my own dynamic blocks two years ago. I pity the fool that has to reverse-engineer them.

Which leads me to...

3 AutoCAD Dynamic Blocks Problems – Confusion, Actions and Baggage

Dynamic Blocks are a powerful and useful tool for AutoCAD users, but again there are so many problems with the creation and interoperability of these.

The way to create and edit dynamic blocks is extraordinarily unintuitive. I’ve spoken to many maths, MD and PhD computer programmers that get lost when things go wrong with dynamic block actions. They stumble around confused, not knowing what action they need to add, how to change the various sub-options, and why they even need some of these options in the first place. On the plus side, if you do manage to figure out dynamic blocks, you can wander around feeling like the Grand Wizard of the CAD Technicians, smug in the knowledge that only you understand what is going on.

An additional downside is that Autodesk has patented the creation and editing of dynamic blocks, which leaves companies and developers with huge legacy libraries, stuck on the AutoCAD hamster wheel. Although many competitor AutoCAD products have chosen to break this patent, they do so at great risk of an impending lawsuit. One of the many reasons people hate Autodesk.

4 The Command Line - The Love Hate Relationship

This is possibly my most controversial hate: the Command line. For most users it’s a love-hate relationship. Like that ex who’s all too familiar, you know you shouldn’t, but you text them anyway.

It’s powerful, allows you to cycle through thousands of commands with a few clicks and is fabulous for developers. My muscle memory is trained, but… is it worth it? It’s so old-fashioned. And clunky! It reminds me of the 1980s tape games, the ones I’m not even old enough to have played. When there are so many better solutions in modern CAD products, AutoCAD, and subsequently its users, remain firmly stuck in the past.

And if you have dyslexia? Total nightmare! “How do you spell...  Boelean, Boelan, Boelaan, Boolean..?” It’s enough to have you in a fit of rage throwing the keyboard across the room.

5 Legacy Code in AutoCAD - Dinosaur Software

Take one look at AutoCAD and you can tell that it wasn’t designed, it evolved – gradually taking new features and entities on top of old ones, always afraid to deprecate anything. It’s a Frankenstein monster of a software product.

As a result, you’re left with far too many options for simple things, like a straight line. To draw a straight line in AutoCAD you can use: Line, Construction Line, Ray, 2D Polyline, LWPolyline (Lightweight Polyline), 3D Polyline, Multiline, Spline…

Legacy code is exhausting and the cause of many of the symptoms mentioned above.

6 Undoing View, Rotate, Zoom Problem - The Ultimate AutoCAD Frustration

When I press undo, AutoCAD infuriatingly undoes my view change and not my command. Why, oh god why, did they put this on as default and not fix it?

7 AutoCAD Paper Space vs Model Space – Why No One Can Agree

As someone with a background in product and usability design, Sheet Sets and layouts have always annoyed me. Whilst I can’t put my finger on exactly what bothers me, the workflow has always felt a bit unintuitive. This is evidenced by the fact that many users ignore AutoCAD Paper Space altogether, and instead scatter lots of blocks across Model Space.

Ideally, there would be a dedicated programme to handle this, similar to Adobe^® InDesign.

8 AutoLISP and DIESEL in AutoCAD – Lost in Code Nobody Understands

LISP (LISt Processing) is affectionately known as “Lost In Stupid Parentheses”, for a reason! Love it or hate it, it’s the number-one go-to for programming tasks in AutoCAD. As such, there are a huge number of free resources online where users share common and repetitive tasks that they have automated. I recommend Lee Mac’s website for thousands of free scripts and tutorials. He’s also a generally nice bloke and always happy to nerd out about coding and LISP.

DIESEL (Direct Interpretively Evaluated String Expression Language) is so obtuse that computer programmers I know, who work with DWG all day, don’t acknowledge it, and a Google search for “DIESEL code” or “DIESEL Macro” will yield few results. Yet, that’s how you programme the UI… For those of you wanting to learn, I highly recommend Ralph Grabowski, his writing made my entrance into coding extremely easy!

9 AutoCAD Single Threading – Why Your Expensive Computer Still Struggles

One of the biggest pain points with AutoCAD is that most of its core functions are single-threaded. In laymen’s terms, that means that AutoCAD can’t multi-task and can only “think” about one thing at a time (women around the world are currently resisting an obvious joke here).

This can create a lag whilst working in AutoCAD, as processes get “bottled up” rather like fans leaving a concert through the same exit at the same time. It also results in some strange requirements for your computer.

This often means that users opt for “more performant” and expensive computers, when a cheaper computer would have actually been faster. Because AutoCAD is single-threaded, it depends more on the clock speed than the number of cores, so a CPU at 5.0 GHz with 6 cores will probably outperform a 3.0 GHz 16-core CPU.

Simply put: next time you're shopping for a new computer for AutoCAD.

I suggest bringing in the help of an LLM, such as ChatGPT or Gemini. It might save you some cash.

10 The DWG File Format – AutoCAD’s Compatibility and Lock-In Issues

The DWG file format was created by Autodesk for AutoCAD, and although the DWG file was reverse-engineered by the ODA in the late 1990s, there are still several compatibility and legal issues around it.

For example, MLeaders created in competitor products often suffer from strange behaviours or misplacements, and other geometry, such as complex 3D objects, can appear corrupted. Additionally, AutoCAD has embedded a “watermark” in its DWG file. This means a warning sign is displayed when a user loads a document that was not created in an Autodesk product.

Whilst you can argue that this is simply to warn users that there might be some of the above compatibility issues, a more cynical person might say that this is a way to discourage users from working with alternative CAD products.

Which brings me nicely to…

11 The Autodesk Monopoly – Why AutoCAD Will Never Truly Improve

Autodesk has a chokehold on the CAD market, so much so, it’s common for users to use the word “CAD” in place of the brand name “AutoCAD”. And it’s not just AutoCAD, many of Autodesk’s products dominate the market.

Along with AutoCAD’s DWG file, Revit^®’s RVT file format is also the “industry standard”, and other file formats such as Fusion^®’s F3D or Inventor’s IPT are also rapidly gaining a hold on the market.

The biggest disadvantage of the AutoCAD/Autodesk monopoly is that companies end up stuck in increasingly tight, restrictive and expensive subscription models. Meanwhile, Autodesk no longer strives to improve itself. Why bother when you don’t have any competition?

Wrapping Up AutoCAD Frustration (Before I Throw My Keyboard)

Although I don’t hate everything about AutoCAD, and genuinely I love CAD, these frustrations are hard to ignore. Some are small annoyances, others are industry-wide problems, but together they’re why so many of us groan every time we open AutoCAD.

Did I miss your biggest annoyance? Do you think I should give the Command line another chance? Let me know and let’s see how long this list can grow!