Hi everyone
Lately, I’ve been experimenting a lot with AI assistants (Cursor, Copilot, Claude, etc.) to optimize and write SketchUp plugins. While they are incredibly fast, we all know they can sometimes make very frustrating mistakes with the SketchUp Ruby API (like missing undo wrappers, directly modifying the model inside an observer, or ignoring geometry tolerances).
So, I decided to fix this. I spent some time compiling a massive, detailed Markdown file containing all the “do’s and don’ts” of the API, heavily inspired by the official SketchUp repos and best practices discussed right here on the forum.
I pushed it to GitHub as an open-source tool for everyone:
github.com/euphraetes/sketchup-ai-skill
How to use it? It’s basically an instruction manual for your AI. Just drop the sketchup_api_skill.md file into your project’s cursorrules, or paste its contents into your AI’s prompt/custom instructions. It forces the AI to check entity.deleted? in observers, wrap operations correctly, avoid temporary files, and use HtmlDialog instead of WebDialog, along with many other strict rules.
It has dramatically reduced the hallucination rate of the AI tools I use.
Since this community is full of brilliant developers, I made it an open repository. If you have any life-saving rules, patterns, or tips that you think AI agents should “memorize” before writing plugins, please feel free to open a PR or share them here. Lets make AI code generation safer for SketchUp.
Cheers, Fırat