Agree with OP that the raw models aren't that useful for schematic/pcb design.
It's why we build flux from the ground up to provide the models with the right context. The models are great moderators but poor sources of great knowledge.
Ultimately the power of flux is connectedness the collaboration that enables but we do plan to ship a standalone app that's unbundled from your web browser in parallel to the web version.
We also have plans to offer some amount of offline capabilities so solve for use cases such as being on a airplane.
Yeah, performance is on our radar now that the core product is mature enough to manufacture boards. Our goal is to get 200 component projects to work well on a regular 2017 generation machine and get to 1000 by end of year.
About vendor lock-in: we def don't want to lock anyone in...so data portability is big focus and we have import/export support for kicad and other formats like STL or Collada already. Planning to add support for Netlists, Altium, Eagle, etc too as well as a REST API.
You can also export your project as a json file today
Agree with OP that the raw models aren't that useful for schematic/pcb design.
It's why we build flux from the ground up to provide the models with the right context. The models are great moderators but poor sources of great knowledge.
Here are some great use cases:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdH075ClrYk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0CHG_fPxzw&t=276s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGJOzVf0o7o&t=2s
and here a great example of levering AI to go from idea to full design https://x.com/BuildWithFlux/status/1804219703264706578