What is fork-a-slicer?

Fork a Slicer is not code you run directly. It is a set of written, numbered plans meant to be fed one at a time to an AI coding assistant, which then does the actual work of forking the open source 3D printer program OrcaSlicer and adding support for Bambu Lab printers. The idea is that a user copies each plan into their AI agent and follows along as the agent edits their own OrcaSlicer fork step by step. Bambu Lab printers normally require Bambu's own closed source network plugin to connect over the network, camera, and cloud features. This project documents a way to run that closed source plugin in a separate isolated process alongside an open source OrcaSlicer fork, so the printer keeps its full feature set while the rest of the program stays open. The approach is based on an existing project called FULU Foundation's OrcaSlicer Bambu Lab fork. The plans are organized into four steps: an overview of the architecture and legal basis, instructions for extracting a security certificate from Bambu's own Connect software, building the bridge infrastructure that lets the two processes talk to each other, and finally patching OrcaSlicer to use the bridge and verifying that it builds and works. The readme spends significant space explaining the legal reasoning behind the project, citing Norwegian copyright law and the European Union's Software Directive, both of which permit studying and adapting software for the purpose of making it work with other programs, even when a license agreement says otherwise. The author is explicit that the project does not distribute Bambu's plugin, certificate, or any of their copyrighted code, only instructions for a user to extract their own copy from software they already own. Everything produced by following the plans becomes the user's own independent implementation, and the repository itself contains no compiled software.