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Comment by FloorEgg | Hacker News Reader

Curious why you're going off of blueprints instead of BIM?

The benefit of estimating quantities and cost cycles in with pre-con and business development, the artifacts during the pre-con design phase tend to be different than the takeoff artifacts which are often transformed through BIM.

Did you learn something to the contrary? Or are you purposely targeting smaller firms and projects that don't use Bim and maybe won't for a long time?

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I really wish BIM took off more, unfortunately most suppliers and GCs are still using blueprints (but at least have moved off paper).

As a developer of STEP, I wish BIM was used less.

What's step?

The ISO 10303 family of standards [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_10303

I was wondering what the training dataset looked like, and I'm very surprised that they're not using BIM data... although after living with an architect for 20 years, I think there's a joke in here somewhere about contractors and planning.

Even if projects use BIM internally it’s still completely possible that the final deliverables are all PDFs/drawings/etc generated from BIM/internal models for contractual/liability reasons etc.

Yes that's what I said, but estimating material quantities of a design is something that you'd want to do at the beginning of the process as close to business development as possible, not at the end of the process during subcontracting. So wouldn't it make the most sense to be applying AI to the data models used by designers, or at least the closest derivative to them?

Yeah this is almost like a solution to the wrong problem. Designers often start with the information in an easily extractable form, then it gets sort of compressed in a way into blueprints / plans to communicate it, and then re-extracted for takeoffs.

BIM and other standardization is really the correct answer to this problem. This is a stop gap to cover for when/if that ever gets widely adopted.

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