What happened when I let an AI agent drive Rhino while I was on the train.
TL;DR
I paired McNeel's brand-new RhinoMCP with the AI agent Claude Code, and built 100 parametric models in Rhino — almost entirely hands-free. Total active time: a few hours. The biggest surprise wasn't the speed. It was that I didn't have to be at my computer to make it happen.
What is RhinoMCP?
RhinoMCP is a brand-new bridge that lets an AI directly drive Rhinoceros 3D.
McNeel (the company behind Rhino) released it on May 5, 2026 — so fresh that there's almost no documentation in the wild yet.
The idea is simple: you talk to Claude in plain English ("place a row of boxes," "loft these curves into a surface"), and the geometry actually appears in Rhino.
GitHub: https://github.com/mcneel/RhinoMCP
Why 100?
Honest answer: I was curious how far an AI could go inside a CAD tool.
One or two prompts only tell you whether something works or doesn't. Run a hundred, and you start seeing the shape of what AI is good at — and where it stumbles.
The lineup roughly breaks down like this:
- L001–L020 — Basic modeling: extrudes, revolves, pipes, lofts
- L021–L040 — Parametric patterns: Voronoi, fractals, L-systems
- L041–L060 — Architectural elements: stairs, roofs, façades, louvers
- L061–L080 — Advanced surface and mesh work
- L081–L100 — Complex 3D forms: TPMS, lattices, crystal structures
The workflow is embarrassingly simple
Three steps:
- Open Rhino and Claude Code on your machine
- Tell Claude what to build next
- Geometry appears in Rhino → screenshot
That's it. Almost zero clicking, dragging, or menu-hunting.
The part that actually surprised me: I wasn't at my computer
This is the real point of the post.
The full set took a few hours of focused time. But I wasn't sitting in front of the screen for those hours.
The actual workflow looked more like this:
- Boot Rhino + Claude Code on my home machine
- Hand it a task list, then leave the apartment
- From my phone, use Claude Code's
/remotecontrolfeature to check progress and steer - Between meetings, on the train, in a café — just "do this next" or "tweak that"
- Come home to ten or twenty new models waiting on screen
The role I was playing shifted. Less about moving the mouse, more about picking the direction.
For someone who's lived in Grasshopper for years, this was clearly a different kind of experience. The variations a designer wants to try — they can now leak out into the gaps in your day.
The barrier to setting this up is also lower than expected. Install the plugin, open a port, connect a session. Verification work that used to eat a full Saturday now fits inside a commute.
Three favorites, designer's pick
A subjective top three.
L070 — Attractor-driven sphere field
Spheres get larger and denser near the center, smaller and sparser toward the edges.
This kind of attractor-based variation usually means writing a Grasshopper definition or a Python script. Here, I just said: "larger spheres closer to the center, in a 3D grid."
For designers who haven't fully committed to Grasshopper, that's a meaningful shortcut.
L080 — Spiral staircase
Treads winding around a central column — a classic architectural motif.
Asking for "a spiral staircase, 20 steps, two full turns" was enough.
It hints at something bigger: that the modeling step itself, in everyday architectural practice, can start to be automated away.
L083 — Torus knot
Tangled, intersecting curves resolved into a continuous surface — normally fiddly to construct by hand.
Doing it with one sentence felt almost unfair.
A few things I learned
Driving CAD with an LLM feels like talking a model into existence
It's not Grasshopper's node graph. It's not Python scripting either.
You say "place another one next to this, rotate it 30 degrees," and the geometry shows up.
For Grasshopper users, it feels like a new operating layer sitting on top of everything else.
Native Rhino is enough, more often than you'd think
Of the 100 models, zero use third-party plugins like Lunchbox or Kangaroo.
For anyone who hands files to clients and worries about plugin dependencies, that's a real win.
For anyone wanting to try it
- McNeel RhinoMCP: https://github.com/mcneel/RhinoMCP
- Rhino 8 (Rhino 7 will be rough)
- Claude Code (Anthropic), or any MCP-capable LLM client
Once you can get "Rhino is running and Claude Code can connect to it" working once, you're basically there. After that, the geometry comes from the conversation.
Want the whole workflow in one place?
I put the full setup, the Claude Code prompting patterns, and the environmental-analysis walkthroughs into a practical guide — plus the 5 ready-to-run Grasshopper definition files Claude generated, so you can open them and explore on your own.
Already 100+ copies sold on the Japanese release.
→ Get the guide + 5 GH files (Gumroad): https://allelishi.gumroad.com/l/rhinomcp-guide
Studio.Allelishi is a research studio at the intersection of architecture, Grasshopper, environmental analysis, and AI.
Follow on X: @allelishi · Web: studio.allelishi.com
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