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Only a small set of construction stakeholders participate in the CAD ecosystem (e.g., architects, large GCs) while a broader set of stakeholders (subcontractors, trades, smaller GCs/CMs) do not receive BIM files and work with PDFs. CAD/BIM is a wonderful aspiration but for many the reality is PDFs.

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Re. "CAD/BIM", technically speaking CAD doesn't imply BIM, and the industry's promotion of BIM is akin to AI promotion among software engineering teams - the benefits aren't clear upon detailed review of the advertised capabilities. The CAD part, on the other hand, is generally recognized as the essential tooling for the profession and I'm surprised to hear that it just is a "wonderful aspiration".

"The profession" actually is a wide variety of trades, not just architects and contractors. Electricians, plumbers etc. where CAD is not yet widely spread. Which hopefully will change in the near future, with open source BIM tool chains, boosted by generative/agentic AI.. Finally, a huge source of confusion and execution hiccups will be overcome.

Until then pdf rules!!!

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