The Future of 3D Printing is Extremely Specific

Someone recently did something extremely important for society.

They made an OilStick holder.

whipped up a little oilstick (@Slant3D) wall control holder in https://t.co/6fwWC8jMy1!

as always, only input was a quick photo of the item w/ caliper measurement. pic.twitter.com/uHarklq80F

— Josh Pigford (@Shpigford) August 26, 2026

Josh Pigford, creator of Nurb, used a photo of an OilStick and a couple caliper measurements to generate a custom holder for his Wall Control setup.

A tiny plastic thing designed to hold another tiny plastic thing.

Humanity marches forward.

But This Is Actually Kinda The Point

For a long time, physical products were reserved for problems important enough to justify the effort of designing and manufacturing a solution.

Your screwdriver keeps rolling off the bench?

Deal with it.

Your vacuum attachment doesn't quite fit?

Have fun holding it together with your hands.

But technologies like agentic CAD and 3D printing have made these small problems more worth solving.

Instead of spending your evening figuring out sketches, constraints, tolerances, and whatever error message Fusion has thrown at you today, the process starts looking like:

Take a photo.

Add a measurement. 

Explain what you want.

3D printing does something similar for manufacturing.

Instead of getting a part quoted, paying for tooling, and then waiting weeks for production, the process starts looking like:

Upload a file.

Pick a material.

Press print.

Suddenly the distance between:

“This is mildly annoying” and “I made a solution”

gets very, very small.

Pretty cool.

Anyways... Nice Holder, Josh

One of the best things about 3D printing is how little it cares about the size of the problem.

The same technology can make production parts at scale, then turn around and solve something so specific it may only matter to one person standing at one workbench.

A clip.

A bracket.

An adapter.

Or a highly specialized throne for a tube of lube.

And if 10,000 other people suddenly decide they want the same throne?

Well...

We know some people with printers.