A recipe for letting your AI Agent of choice help you design your yard, patio, parking, swimming pool, etcetera in Blender.
Your ideas can be rendered and iterated on solely in memory (in the REPL as we Clojurians say) without updating any files. When you're happy, the design is persisted as data and code (but I am repeating myself) in the project. You can also create custom UI in Blender in the REPL and iterate on it before persisting to files in the project.
YouTube: Yardcraft: Redesigning my terrace w/ Calva + Blender + Basilisp + Grok
Blender is driven live by you and the AI agent using Basilisp (Clojure on Python) over nREPL in (my fork of) basilisp-blender.
This recipe is provided to you as this project, and you then use your AI Agent as your guide and doer to set things up. Once you have things set up, you enter genie mode and can throw your ideas at the agent which carries them out and maintains the project for you. True vibe designing.
- Git
- A competent AI agent (Suggestion: Grok for design work. Not Grok for the project setup)
The agent will help you get everything else in place. (If you don't have Git, the agent can help you with that too, of course.)
- On github.com/PEZ/yardcraft, click Use this template
- Clone your copy of the repo
- Open the clone in your editor (the example below assumes Cursor).
- Say Hello to your AI agent in a new chat. It takes things from there.
Human: Hello
Click to open/close rest of chat session
Agent: Hello! Yardcraft is designing your yard (patio, parking, lawn, trees — whatever) in Blender with me as your AI pair. I build in Blender, you check the viewport in Blender, we save into this project when you're happy. Don't worry if you don't know Blender — I can guide you. How would you rate your Blender knowledge? 1 never used it → 5 expert.
Human: 2
Agent: Perfect. For some parts of the setup I can do it or only give you instructions. Which do you prefer?
Human: Do.
Agent: ...installs Babashka, Calva and Calva Backseat Driver extensions... Babashka (our automation engine and general scripting tool) and editor tooling is in place. Let's connect a Babashka REPL. Please issue the command: Calva: Start a Project REPL and Connect (aka Jack-in), then choose Babashka in the Project Type menu. You should see the REPL indicator in the status bar turn ember colored and also there should appear a green indicator with bb (Short for Babashka) in the label. Let me know when you've done this (or if you need help/something doesn't work).
Human: Done. I see the status bar items you mentioned.
Agent: Great. Remind me later to give you a crash course in Calva and Babashka, but for now let's focus on getting everything up and running. Next we need to install latest Blender. Please install it from https://www.blender.org/download/. If you already have Blender it is worth checking that you have the latest version and upgrade it if not. Tell me when it's done.
Human: I didn't have Blender. Now installed!
Agent: We need to install basilisp-blender, an extension that both makes Blender scriptable via interactive programming (a super dynamic kind of programming) and gives us (you and me) a connection to the Blender runtime environment. I will install the right version, but I see that Blender is still running after you tested that it starts. Please close it.
Human: Blender closed!
Agent: ...installs the basilisp-blender extension in Blender... Extension installed, now we need to start its nREPL server so that I can drive Blender. Please start Blender again and open the Output Properties tab (printer icon) and find the Basilisp nREPL server panel. Set the project path to this project folder, then click START SERVER. Tell me when it's running.
Human: Server running.
Agent: Next step is to connect me to the Blender nREPL server. In Cursor issue the command: Calva: Connect to a running REPL server in the project. Then select basilisp-blender in the Project Type menu. The indicator may stay on bb, but if you click the indicator you should see basilisp-blender in the sessions menu.
Human: Done.
Agent: ⚡️ That means we are connected. Let me test the REPL. You should see an empty site in Blender — just the stage, no house or lot yet. I'll put something more fun there. Watch in Blender or here...
... The agent hammers on the REPL ...
What do you see now?
Human: I see YARDCRAFT in perspective, with some furniture on. And... I think a sundial ... And it's like I am flying around it in a circle, with the design always centered in the view. I also see a Yardcraft UI panel with some widgets.
Agent: Sweet. The UI should have a time-of-day slider you can use to see the change in how the shadows fall (and thus the sundial showing the time). You can then click the Set time button to align the lounger chairs to face the sun.
Human: Yeah, totally works!
Agent: You can exit the fly-cam mode by zooming or panning in Blender. To enable it again, click the Fly Cam button.
Human: Great. That worked fine.
Agent: There is a feature in that UI with suggestions. The way it works is that from a base design we can create alternatives, and add them to the UI suggestions list where you can switch between them. We should verify that it works with the demo design. Suggest some redesign we can test it with, please. If you suggest something simple, like move something, or add a stair, that is pretty quick.
Human: Add stairs down from that A in CRAFT down the back side (opposite the furniture), and move the sundial with its pedestal to the side of the new stairs.
Agent: ...Agent cranks on the design a while, the changes appear and then dissappear...There you go, yardcrafter, test selecting the "Brick A-stairs" suggestions from the list and click the Show button. To switch back, click the Base button.
Human: I'm done testing. Worked as advertised!
Agent: Great, I'll persist the changes to the files in the project. ...Writes files... Tooling setup is done. Next is to start with your actual yard.
Agent: I will need to ask you for information and material so that we can get the base structure of your yard up to replace the demo design. Material such as maps and sketch over photos, and we will try to find information from the web and any open APIs to make the manual labor less. You can look at the MY-BASE-DESIGN-PROCESS.md document to get an idea for what the process may look like. Or just jump straight in at the deep end, let me know when you are ready for the next step.
Human: Let's get cranking!
The setup chat above will look differently depending on a lot of things. You may be using something else than Cursor (I've heard such stories!), Blender could be installed. Maybe you rather do the setup steps yourself and just have the agent as a guide. And so on. But the differences up to here are nothing compared to what's ahead. So I will leave off here, you will figure it out and the LLMs of today are super handy when it comes to knowing about and finding out about different options.
You can read a bit on what process I found with my terrace redesign here: MY-BASE-DESIGN-PROCESS.md. And also you may want to have a watch: YouTube: Yardcraft: Redesigning my terrace w/ Calva + Blender + Basilisp + Grok (Which doesn't cover base setup a ton, but there is at least a mention.)
A super powerful feature of Blender is that it supports creating custom UI via scripting. You should leverage this, I think. This project comes with a small starter pack of widgets for the Yardcraft tab. (Press N with the design area active to open the design side bar, there you will find Yardcraft.)
This UI was vibe coded using interactive programming in the REPL, just like the design. That means that I asked the AI to create some UI for some thing and it used the REPL connection to Blender to make the UI appear, without editing any files in the project. There we could iterate on the UI, and when I was happy enough I told the AI so and it wired the updates into the files on disk.
A note here is that “happy enough” may mean I let some issues slip, because I could easier fix them myself in the data declaring the UI in the files. The REPL is not just for the AI. Striking the balance here can be tricky, but at least know that there is a balance to strike.
This recipe has preparations for a process of making a base design and then from there creating suggestions. And then the custom UI has a selector for the suggestions so that it is easy to switch between them. It works, but there are probably better approaches, because it is a bit brittle with when suggestions deviate from the base. (Then again, perhaps the AI can be convinced to maintain this with discipline.)
The prepared process is like so:
- Ask the agent for a suggestion. E.g. "Give the swimming pool an arch at the southeast end, with fullwidth stairs descending towards the bottom”.
- The agent creates the suggestion in the REPL as well as adding it to the selector in the UI.
- You verify what's done using the UI selector, and ask for changes until you are happy.
- The agent persists the suggestion and the UI by updating the files in the project.
In the Yardcraft: Redesigning my terrace w/ Calva + Blender + Basilisp + Grok video on YouTube you can see an example of a fly tour. It took a surprisingly long time to create. I think I may have gone about it the wrong way, or it is just a limitation of the current top AI models that they have a hard time visualizing a 3D tour like that, making the communication lossy. Anyway, like with the suggestions, realizing when it is better to let the AI write the files and then edit them will save you time. The fly tour is very data driven, so you can tweak the tour design pretty easily.
This project does not contain any third party assets, but there is a skill for it so the agent knows how to go about finding resources online, download them, install them, make them part of your design, and so on.
However, there are some few included props, the furniture. It is deliberately designed to be simple and unbranded. They are declared in code, but still render super fast, because very blocky. Perhaps the best use you will have for them is as examples so that the agent can create more props like that, without going overboard with it. (Unless your yard project is designing furniture, of course.)
In theory you should be able to generate a “quote plan” from any design and suggestion at will by evaluating something like:
(plan/write-quote-plan! (sug/effective-site data/site))at the REPL (from site.cljc). In practice this is a bit quirky, but the AI can handle it so if you have the patience ask it to generate the plan for you instead. (Or ask it to fix so that quote-plans can be generated more reliably from the active suggestion.)
The quote plan is a top-down view of the design, with lengths, areas, and angles included, and materials hinted at. It's meant so that you can ask a contractor for a quote. If you're planning to do the work yourself, you can use it to source quotes and such. Probably you can ask the AI to create a calculator, even.
As should be obvious, this is totally open ended. A first thing some people may want to extend with is some way to juggle different properties in the same project. Others may want to use the general process to design complete other things, like PCBs, or whatever.
Wherever you take this, I hope you will consider writing about it and also send PRs to this template project.
As more people use this recipe we should be able to improve the skills and instructions to get quicker and more efficient help from the AI for less tokens. Please help other users of the recipe by PR:ing such improvements.
- This README
- Base design process (how I created my base design):
MY-BASE-DESIGN-PROCESS.md - Yardcraft recipe framework, code and data:
src/yardcraft/ - Agent orientation (knowhow, guidance, conventions, etcetera):
AGENTS.md - Recipe package (skills, example images, helper scripts):
recipe/
(Open source and free to use. 🗽🍻)
Note
The guided setup (as described in the Example chat) takes a somewhat strong model. And for the help with reifying your design ideas in Blender, it also takes a competent model. It's a bit surprising how different the models handle it. On a scale 1 -> 10, if I grade them from some quick testing using Cursor.
| Model | Setup guidance | Get the setup done | Design help | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grok 4.6 (and 4.5) | 5 | 10 | 9 | Narrates itself during setup |
| GPT 5.2 Sol | 9 | 9 | 5 | Almost human tone of voice |
| Sonnet 5 | 4 | 8 | 5 | Decent, but a bit unreliable |
| GLM 5.2 | 4 | 8 | 5 | Works and thinks a lot before greeting |
| Kimi K3 | 2 | - | - | DNF |
Grok: The by far best designer of the ones I tested. Fails at being a setup guide, even if it gets the setup done. It starts: I'll start by loading the Yardcraft hello path so the first thing you see is the real welcome, not a status dump., then explores for a while and continues: Greeting first, then I'll quietly see what's already in place so the next thing you get is a clear picture and two questions. I am probably holding it wrong.
I suggest you use GPT 5.2 Sol for the Hello guide until you have a demo design running in Blender. Then switch to Grok.
This project relies on my fork of basilisp-render. Because the latest release of basilisp-render bundles a version of Basilisp which has an issue with dynamically requiring namespaces. The workarounds are pretty clunky so I choose to bundle a version without that issue (Basilisp 0.5.1, latest at the time of this writing). I filed a PR on basilisp-render with the bumping. You find a zip with the patched version here: (https://github.com/PEZ/basilisp-blender/releases/tag/v0.5.0-basilisp-0.5.1).