alt Hacker NewsI cannot wait for the day when tech companies become players in the construction industry because it looks like it is the only way forward to make a change.
To think that everything has been digitalized a long time ago, yet contract law cannot properly deal with delineating responsibilities between GC and Architects, who are still sending 2D drawings to each other.
Imagine, all this information about quantities and door types (and everything else) is already available and produced by the architect's team, BUT they cannot share it! Because if they do, they are responsible for the numbers in case something is wrong.
So now there is this circus of: Arch technologist making the base drawing with doors. GC receives documents, counts doors for verification, and sends them to the sub. Subcontractor looks at these drawings, counts them again, and sends data to the supplier. Guess what, the supplier also looks, counts, confirms, and back we go.
Though I think robotics will change all of that. And when we have some sort of bot assistance, big tech players will have a bigger leverage in this, which will lead to the proper change management architecture.
Anyway, cool product. Anything to help with estimation. Really hope it gets traction.
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Hey thanks!! For estimation we cover division 08 (doors and opening) you can use it for your estimating purposes with these two endpoints:
- Counting all the doors: https://www.getanchorgrid.com/developer/docs/endpoints/drawi... - Extracting schedules in architectural drawings: https://www.getanchorgrid.com/developer/docs/endpoints/drawi...
and use Claude or any other AI tool to wire up the UI
We're releasing toilets (division 10) later this week, then floors and pipes next.
I couldn’t agree more. The fact this data isn’t programmable is really holding the industry behind.
When building PlanGrid there were so many things we wished we could have done had this been unlocked.
I’m now working on doing just that.
I’ve worked on projects where a lot of work was done in highly collaborative drawings on Bluebeam, in which vendors add their markups and items and the program facilitates counting it all at the end of the phase. My role was only in things like wireless AP placement and low voltage cabling drop locations, not anything safety critical like doors, but I assume those vendors were able to keep track of those items in a similar way. For actual engineering projects I’m glad so many people have to take the time to count.
I had a job as HVAC engineer for the upgraded Oslo Airport back in 2011; started doing HVAC work for 3 weeks the rest was programming trying to make the rest of people more efficient. Made an Excel sheet with a lot of macros to manage all the drawing of the airport. That’s why I switched to programming when I continued to study, and did not want to come back before I got more experience.
They even gave me a big desk at Trondheim/Tyholt so I could help them with the software during my studies.