I used to work at an architecture firm that specialized in design and manufacturing. One of our more popular products was facades made from aluminum panels with "graphic perforation", a pattern of holes made to form an image at a distance. As you can imagine, for larger projects the number of unique pieces to be cut was into the hundreds. This represented a lot of time for our CAM programmers because the (quite mature and industry standard) CAM software we used was incapable of determining the proper cut orientation without manual input. This meant clicking holes a bunch of times per panel to switch which side of the curve was cut. No Bueno.

One of our primary CAD suites was Rhino which is very nice and has a great python API. So I wrote a full-fledged 2.5D CAM processor for that. This allowed us to batch process hundreds of these parts with a single click.