Modern lens design software with open APIs from day one — a CLI, a programmatic interface, and an MCP server so AI agents can drive a real ray tracing optical-design tool.
LensHH-LT is out now: a complete sequential design tool for Windows, Linux and Apple Silicon, $385 once, no subscription, free for 45 days.
Optical-design software built around how engineers and AI agents work today: capable enough for serious design work, fully scriptable through a CLI and programmatic API, and ready for AI agents through an open MCP server.
Cross-platform desktop application built on Avalonia and .NET 8 with a native C++ ray tracer. Runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS.
Every workflow available in the GUI is also available via the CLI, the programmatic API, or the MCP server. The GUI, CLI, and MCP server source is MIT-licensed.
One-time purchase, two-machine activation, free LensHH-LT for students and academics. No subscriptions.
The interface an optical design program offers decides what you can automate. Ours offers three, and they are the same program underneath.
Most optical design software was built for a person at a keyboard, and the automation was added afterwards, one exported function at a time. LensHH-LT was written the other way round: the GUI, the command line and the MCP server are three front doors onto one engine, so anything you can do in the interface you can also do in a script, in your own code, or by asking an agent.
That last one is the part that is genuinely new. Through the Model Context Protocol server — tested with Claude Code and Claude Desktop — an agent can build a lens surface by surface, mark variables, author a merit function, run an optimizer, and read back MTF, spot diagrams and aberration coefficients to decide what to do next. Not a chatbot describing optics: an agent operating the tool and looking at the results.
The GUI, CLI and MCP server are open source under the MIT license, so what an agent is allowed to do is something you can read rather than take on trust. See what LensHH-LT does →
Optical design is usually taught on software a graduate cannot afford to keep. That seemed worth fixing.
LensHH-LT is free for students and academics: the full program, not a limited teaching build, valid for two years and renewable once. Apply with your institutional email address and that is the whole process. LensHH-Pro will carry an academic discount, announced at launch.
For a course, the useful part is usually the scripting rather than the price. A problem set can ship as a file and a script; an assignment can be checked by running it. And a student who learns on it keeps the same tool afterwards, because a perpetual license does not expire when the enrolment does. Apply for an academic license →
Real designs, with the numbers and the wrong turns left in.
The trial is the complete program for 45 days, and it opens the Zemax, CODE V, OSLO, OpTaliX and Optiland files you already have — so the first thing you evaluate it on can be a lens you already know.
Download the free trial →