Overheard a younger drafter say AutoCAD is dead and got me thinking

Was at a supply shop in Phoenix last Tuesday and heard a guy in his 20s tell his friend that everyone should just switch to Revit or BIM and that AutoCAD is a waste of time. I've been drafting for over 15 years and still use AutoCAD daily for 60% of my commercial projects because it's faster for certain details and layouts. Am I missing something or is there still a solid place for AutoCAD in a modern drafting workflow?

3 comments

3 Comments

sean_cooper581mo ago

Revit's great for big coordination jobs but calling AutoCAD dead ignores how much of the existing building stock still needs to be documented. Older buildings and renovations often don't have clean Revit families ready to go, and AutoCAD handles that messy stuff way faster. Until every existing building comes with a perfect BIM model, AutoCAD's not going anywhere.

uma_williams1mo agoTop Commenter

Wait... you're saying some people actually think AutoCAD is dead? That's wild to me. I've been doing this long enough to remember when everyone swore it would be gone by 2015. The reality is, I've worked on projects where we had to scan old blueprints from the 1920s and trace them into CAD before we could even think about BIM. And those messy renovations you mentioned? I've spent whole afternoons trying to force a weird old window into a Revit family when I could have sketched it in AutoCAD in ten minutes flat. So yeah, calling it dead just ignores how much of our built world still lives in that format.

lilyp371mo ago

I spent last Tuesday trying to make a Revit family for a 1930s casement window with a weird crank handle. Three hours later I just gave up and did it in AutoCAD in maybe 15 minutes while my coworker laughed at me. Ngl, until someone invents a time machine to go back and BIM-model every building built before 2005, we're all gonna keep that old CAD license.