Took a month off SolidWorks and came back to a little surprise in the UI

Same thing happened to me over the summer. I was away from my workstation for about six weeks helping my brother move, and when I sat back down to finish a conveyor guard model, there was this chat bubble hovering near the top of the screen asking if I wanted design suggestions. Genuinely thougt I'd clicked something wrong at first. I gave it a few chances before writing it off. Asked it about a clearance issue I was having between the guard and a bearing housing, and it came back with advice so vague it could've applied to anything. Felt like asking a coworker who'd never touched the software for help and getting a shrug in paragraph form.

What worked for me was turning it off entirely rather than just ignoring it. It sat in my peripheral vision and bugged me every session untill I went into the options and killed it. Took a bit of clicking around to find the right checkbox, but once it was gone the whole interface felt like my software again. I'll admit one thing it did that surprised me though. A few weeks later I was stuck on how to model a tricky fillet transition, so I gave the assistant one more shot out of desperation, and it pointed me in a direction I hadn't considered. Not a fix, more like a nudge. So I keep it disabled but remember it exists for when I'm truly stuck. Coming back after time away is jarring enought without the tool rearranging itself on you.

I had a similar experience, but mine wasn't about some new pop-up assistant. I was working on a massive tooling assembly, something with maybe fifty parts, and I had left it saved and running for a few days before taking a quick three-day trip. When I came back, the software itself was behaving strangely regarding material property assignments. It was forcing me to redefine several feature properties that I had relied on for months.

It was like the entire project file was suddenly running on a slightly diferent version of the core engine, even though I thought I was just running the latest service pack. Instead of just being a new button, it felt like the fundamental way the part geometry interacted with the Bill of Materials had been tweaked, causing a bunch of dimensioning issues when I tried to use a standard datum plane. I spent a good afternoon just correcting parameters instead of finishing the machining routines. It wasn't the AI helper that got me, it was the silent change in how the environment handled saved configurations. You get used to the workflow of your specific machine and your specific files, and when the software quietly decides to tighten up those internal standards, it throws a wrench in the works, no matter how small the update seems.

Mine did the opposite trick. Turned the thing off months ago, then a big update re-enabled it and reset half my options along with it. Took me an hour to get my shortcuts and colors back to normal. Now I export my settings every couple months so a surprise update can't wipe them again. Worth doing if you haven't allready.

I don't buy the idea that this AI thing acutally helped with a tricky fillet transition, even if it was just a nudge. I tried getting it to help me with a specific surface loft once, and all it did was give me a basic list of parameters. It was basicly just telling me what I already knew about the function. The suggestions felt like they were pulled from a generic instruction manual, not from having any actual design knowledge. For me, the moment the assistant starts talking, I lose my focus entirely. It shifts the whole feel of the software from being a tool I control to being something that's trying to guide me. It just adds more clutter and friction to the actual modeling process. I stick to my old workflow, no matter how buggy the updates get!

Update: tried the settings export trick from the reply above and it actually works, saved a copy to a shared drive so I can grab it on any machine. Also did another test with the assistant on my bracket, asked it something specific about hole patterns and got the same vague boilerplate as before. Guess I'll keep it hidden and let it mature a bit.