I found some novel features like "extrude until" while reading through "Examples" section of CadQuery documentation. The final example on that page (as of this writing) was for a cycloidal gear and it reminded me of a big reason why I'm looking into code CAD to begin with: I can do things in code! Cycloidal gear profile can get a bit involved to draw with standard 2D sketching tools, and 2D sketches require work to make them adjustable to suit different parameters. But as a code CAD platform, CadQuery can consume gear profile defined with Python math functions. And since it's a Python function, it takes very little extra work to have it recompute a different profile based on function parameters.

But while a cycloidal gear looks cool, it's not what I would want to design and 3D print. Well, I tend to avoid printing gears entirely because 3D printers don't have the precision necessary for good gears, but when it is unavoidable, I prefer to use standard mechanical engineering involute gears. As they are quite standard, I was confident someone has already written CadQuery code to generate involute gears and I found not one but two examples in the CadQuery contributions repository.

Easy publication of small functional snippets like this is another advantage of code CAD: it fits right into source code control and publishing infrastructure. A bit of Python file is a lot more easily maintained and ensure availability compared to FreeCAD's approach of publishing an entire workbench called FCGear.

While I love seeing the concept of user-contributed code CAD repository, the actual execution may not be panning out. Code contribution frequency to cadquery-contrib isn't as high as what I would interpret as a popular and vibrant user community. What's going on? Maybe this specific repository fell out of favor for some reason with the user community, and they're sharing via some other mechanism I haven't discovered. Or maybe nobody is using CadQuery and the project is on a path of a slow decline into irrelevance. I hope it is the former and not the latter, but even then it wouldn't be the first time I put effort into a platform that faded away. I shouldn't let that fear discourage me as I climb CadQuery's learning curve.