How I Built Engine-X With Claude

By Parth Parmar

I'm not a professional software engineer. Engine-X — a 3D atlas that lets you explode, section and watch a turbocharger and a V-belt pulley drive run with true kinematics — exists because I worked through it turn by turn with Claude, Anthropic's AI assistant, instead of writing every line of Three.js and geometry math myself from scratch.

Starting with the idea, not the code

The starting point wasn't a codebase — it was a picture in my head: I wanted to actually see how a turbocharger works, part by part, instead of reading another diagram or watching another animation that skips the mechanism. I described that to Claude — what I wanted the viewer to feel like, what should happen when you explode the parts, how sectioning should work — and we built the app's architecture together from there: a shared geometry toolkit for gears, shafts, bolts and belts, and a simple pattern where every machine is just a file that describes its own parts and how they move.

Building part by part, machine by machine

The turbocharger came first — turbine housing, compressor housing, the shared shaft, bearings — each part modeled as real 3D geometry, not a flat image, so it could be exploded and rotated from any angle. Later, I had an old leftover file for a pulley-and-belt drive from an earlier attempt. Rather than uploading it as-is (it was built differently and wouldn't have fit cleanly), Claude rebuilt it properly inside Engine-X's actual architecture — matching the same part-by-part pattern as the turbocharger — without touching or breaking anything that already worked.

The debugging story: a site stuck at "0%"

Not everything went smoothly. At one point the live site got stuck indefinitely on "Machining the parts 0%" — the loading screen would appear but the 3D model never showed up. We went through it layer by layer: checked for JavaScript errors, tested whether the CDN serving the 3D library was reachable, and eventually built a small diagnostic script that loaded every dependency one at a time so a failure would name the exact file responsible, instead of a vague, generic error. That's how we found the real cause — a single file that had quietly gone missing from the deployed repository. Once it was restored, the site came back to life.

Why this approach worked for me

I didn't need a computer science degree to build something real. What mattered was being clear about what I wanted, describing problems precisely when something broke, and being willing to go back and forth until it actually worked — not just looked like it worked. Engine-X is proof that with the right process, one person with an idea and no traditional coding background can ship a genuinely interactive, technically accurate piece of engineering education.