Turn MEP prompts into AutoCAD drawings in minutes | Hacker News Reader

Turn MEP prompts into AutoCAD drawings in minutes

automep.app

9 pointsvannventures13 comments

Hi. Licensed architect here. I am absolutely all for further automation in the AEC sector. But if a licensed MEP used this I would report them to the state for violating the standard of care.

Across the licensed professions in building design, our license requirements state (in summary) that we certify that the documents were prepared under our "close supervision."

I think in all states if A and E professionals form a corporation it must be one with PERSONAL liability. Corporate structures that shield the licensees from personal liability are not allowed. In extreme cases we can even be held criminally liable if work performed under our license is negligent. And you can't get away with being clever and not "stamping" the work. I think in all states you can prepare documents for permitting a single family home without a license. However, if you ARE licensed, in most states you're still required to stamp the documents - or even in the most permissive states you are considered to have legally certified the documents if they are produced by an office with a licensed A or E professional.

Our licenses are not about ability, they're about liability. And it's not just the license holder deciding acceptable levels of risk. Even more it's the professional liability insurer for what's commonly called your "Errors and Omissions" policy. I don't use my license at the moment, but when I worked for other licensed architects, often their policy stipulated that to maintain their policy even their employees had to take continuing ed in risk management. I can't imagine any insurer would sign off on this.

Correct me if I'm wrong. The licensed MEP can supervise unlicensed people. However, the licensed MEP takes the full liability for it.

How is this different?

A licensed architect or SMEP can supervise unlicensed people, and yes they take the liability. That junior person, if they're put in a position to do any damage generally has a professional or pre-professional degree in the field. They have been taught the necessity of the standard of care. They can suffer consequences - if something goes wrong it can be blamed on them. (even if as unlicensed staff they can't really take legal liability.)

What they are not is a probabilistic model that cannot be held accountable for errors. I mean, unless the developers of automep.app want to take legal liability for the performance of their model.

Right, but there is still liability, right? And liability still resides in the licensed professional. It doesn't go straight from the model to the customer.

It's pretty common for CAD software (and other software in general) to have an AS/IS license. It's up to the user to detect it and correct any bugs the software may have had.

Which is why no ethical licensed professional would allow it to be used under their license. And if by they were unethical enough to do so, other licensed professionals would report them for what they're doing - violating the legally mandated standard of care. That's what I've been saying since the beginning.

Fun idea but the liability must be immense for the user. This is even worse than lawyers getting hallucinated court cases since the output has real physical implications.

I’ve worked with a lot of builders and engineers who swear the architect must have been hallucinating and question whether having ChatGpt produce the drawings would be any worse.

As and architect I wouldn't blame some of those GC's and engineers. We're an odd bunch.

Which is why I said liability. If something catastrophic goes wrong, the engineer is still liable at the end of the day.

Why put in the work on the front end when you can triage a barrage of random RFI's during build out? Better have healthy E&O..

Hey OP, can you share how you came across this company? It is incredibly new, the domain has only been registered for a few weeks, and their are barely any google results for it.

I don’t get the sense that there’s a lot of value being added here. I upload drawing files to a startup server, which may be proprietary or sensitive data under NDA as is often the case with projects like data centers, and what the service does for me is translate a prompt into an API call to auto desk automation platform? Why don’t I just put their API documentation in a context file and have a model generate the same API calls? I just get the sense that this is such a thin rapper that I don’t really understand charging money for it.

I want to like this, but... While I do want generative AI for CAD, I really want it to generate initial files for me from scratch. That's where the bulk of the work is. Also, I'm not a building architect - my work is in mechanical and electrical systems. It wasn't readily apparent to me which domain this functions for.

The commercial vid was not very good IMO - I didn't get a sense of the actual product value-add at all. As an prospective customer, that's what matters to me, not terrible jokes.

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