Launch HN: Drafted (YC P26) – Models for residential architecture | Hacker News Reader

Launch HN: Drafted (YC P26) – Models for residential architecture

60 pointsPrimalNick63 comments

I’m Nick, founder of Drafted (https://www.drafted.ai). We’re training models that generate residential architecture from structured design constraints.

Product demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QkJ7jNU9y4

Residential architecture is still one of the most expensive, slow, and inaccessible creative processes in the world. Designing a custom home typically costs $10,000–$50,000 or more, takes months, and requires making major decisions before most people can even visualize the outcome. As a result, the vast majority of homes are built without direct architectural involvement.

Our goal is to teach computers how the built environment works so anyone can imagine, explore, and eventually create physical spaces tailored to them.

Today, users can design homes using simple inputs such as: - Square footage targets - Footprint shapes - Lot boundaries - Room placement preferences - Spatial relationships and constraints.

Our models generate complete floor plans and matching exterior elevations in seconds. Users can explore designs in both 2D and 3D, iterate instantly, furnish interiors, experiment with materials, and export CAD, PDF, and other files for the rest of the pre-construction process.

One of our newest capabilities allows users to draw any footprint shape and generate a complete home layout inside it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZJhBm7-OHI.

Over the past month, more than 120,000 people have used Drafted, generating over 325,000 home designs.

If you're building a home, developing property, working in architecture, construction, or AI, we'd love to hear your feedback!

I'll bite. I'm currently building a new home based on plans of my own design, literally taking a lunch break now from hanging electrical gangboxes.

Do you have a background in homebuilding? Or have you ever built anything before?

Visualizing the design is one thing, but the feasibility must be considered -- and often vetted through engineer(s) -- from the initial design phase. And even then, despite the best planning attempts, inevitably there will be some issues that need to be addressed 'on-the-ground' during construction.

I think you may be onto something, and I believe LLM models could be capable of accounting for e.g. code restrictions, structural considerations, MEP conflicts, etc. Most of the 'knowledge' homebuilders accumulate is trainable and repeatable. And- at least in the US- most of it has been codified/standardized in the IRC. But still there are tons of little caveats & gotchas to consider. Maybe those details could be addressed directly in your system prompts?

Also curious: what kind of "other files" does Drafted export "for the rest of the pre-construction process"? IDK to what extent you've used any existing home design software, but Home Designer/Chief Architect are capable of creating a (detailed) BOM for the entire build, down to every member of framing lumber. If the user chooses to enter price information, they can also provide cost estimates. A seemingly obvious AI-assisted improvement would be gathering price data automatically- say from the Lowe's or similar Big Box Hardware nearest to the user's location. And ideally keeping it updated as lumber & other materials fluctuate in cost.

To me a really capable AI design software could also be capable of: - Basic electrical load calculations - HVAC/ Schedule D [ductwork] design - Structural considerations- e.g., recommending a joist plan: type/size/direction/spacing of floor joists + validating against IRC and/or joist manufacturer load tables - and a whole lot more

I have a number of other ideas in case you're interested. Feel free to send an email (in profile).

PS- are you familiar with BIM software (like AutoDesk Revvit)? There a lot of 3D modeling capabilities you could borrow that go way beyond floor plans and aesthetic architectural considerations.

You are literally building your own house? that's cool!

I started and ran a tech-enabled pre-construction service for ~6 years and grew up in a homebuilding family.

Codes, structural, MEP, and pricing are definitely huge pieces of the buildability puzzle. These are layers we plan to train into the model. Right now we are focused on the schematic level ideation process. So figuring out the flow and shape that can often a take a while to stabilize in the architectural design process.

Once we have this tooling built out, we will add more layers of context that helps make better buildability and cost decisions.

Super familiar with other BIM software. Chief Architect is a more residentially opinionated one. We are hoping to bridge the gap between these high-skill bar softwares and anyone wanting to design. Their capabilities and data structures are helpful robust usability. Just a bit complicated for most people. We are working on more interopability, so people can continue in whatever workflow while we are focused on the schematic level design phase (currently have DXF, IFC, GLB, and PDF exporting).

I'll shoot you an email :)

I don't see your email in your bio, so I followed you on X to DM you.

There is probably more money in this as entertainment than architecture. And less liability.

How many of us have made house plans at some point?

Oooofff I want there to be some truth to this statement.

The SIMs ran my life for a while and today if there was a "build this plan into a real house" as a lead gen...

My gut says the crossover/cross-sale is just too hard and niche, but if it works, it sounds like one of those genius ideas.

There are a lot of people who dream scroll well in advance of buying or building, so we hope this can be a good place for productive exploration. I'm hoping people get inspired enough to want to go build.

I've looked at a few dozen of the designs featured on the front page, and most of them don't make sense. What is the purpose of this?

In 2-3 days, we are pushing a change to the flow of the product to start on a project and orient more heavily towards designing with a purpose. That page will still exist, but as a place you go for inspiration or a starting point (we have remixing). It'll be nested in a sidebar where pinned inspiration is stored inside of a project and will autofilter based on what you're trying to do with your project to be more relevant.

Try creating a design and let me know how that goes!

Is a slop project from someone with the handle 'PrimalNick' a big surprise?

This is fun! I hadn't thought about how much possibility space there was in home layouts until now. Some layouts make a lot more sense than others.

I've thrown some weird setups at it like a high bedroom:bathroom ratio and it's doing a great job at distributing bathroom access between the bedrooms, and arranging the bedrooms around shared spaces.

Thanks for sharing.

Thank you for trying it out :)

There's an insanely big probability space and everyone has very unique desires/preferences when designing.

I'm really excited to see what people come up with.

I just looked at the very first one featured on your website ("Sprawling Dark 5 Bed")[1]:

- A car parked in the garage perpendicular to the door and the other differently-sized car

- A bedroom missing a closet

- Attached bathrooms with multiple sinks

- An office with a weird entrance from a dead space from the garage

- External doors that open the wrong way (against fire code in most places)

- Closet doors opening inward

- Both doors of the top-left bathroom opens into the sinks (why two sinks?)

- The top-left bathroom has a weird dead space between the shower and bathtub (why both?)

- the random little floating feature in the middle of the open floorplan space doesn't make any structural or aesthetic sense

- The two bedrooms in the lower left with the weird bump-out for the windows that make no sense

- The window placement for many windows don't make sense and don't even line up with the 3D view of the house

- The hallway on the left that turns and goes to nowhere for no reason

- The additional random inaccessible dead spaces next to the bottom right bathroom

It took me just a few minutes to see this. I hope nobody ever builds a home based on these plans.

[1] https://cdn.drafted.ai/thumb/drafts/23025/generations/94729/...

Edited for formatting, to add a few points I missed, and to add a link to the image

I appreciate the feedback. They aren't perfect. The renders are just aethetic images that often rewrite the plan, the base plan that you can download doesn't include these. We are working on adding the generation for these objects directly into the base generation to fix these issues. They currently just serve as a way to get more context quickly so people can understand the floor plan better.

If you're someone looking for a schematic design level tool that can allow you to explore design for free then this will allow you to develop ideas and figure out a starting point to work off of.

We will continue to improve the model and build out more tooling for guiding it.

I try to avoid hating but that's pretty rough.

Dual vanities/basins (at least in an en suite) is not uncommon. (Edit: was looking at wrong bathroom - yes, very weird there.) Nor having separate bath and shower.

We had both in our last house which was a mid-range build and not overly expensive at the time (very cheap in hindsight).

Not commenting on the placements though. Looking at the floorplan, it’s a pretty silly layout that could at least be used as a starting point then tweaked, but at that point you might as well start with an off the shelf plan first. Reminds me of a procedurally generated dungeon game.

This is a lot of fun.

https://cdn.drafted.ai/thumb/drafts/27019/generations/98723/...

- off-bathroom conference room!

- side-by-side toilets

- garage inaccessible except via bathroom

it's engrossing!

Also most (but not all!) of the designs seem to omit laundry facilities. I wonder whether there's a pattern there.

We had a bug with our furnishing generations that is now fixed, we are working on backfilling all of the old renders that had the issue. Hopefully this fixes most of the room rewriting that's happening.

Bidet?

A bidet would be cool and something we can add to the roadmap!

Also they only support single-story homes but that image includes a staircase

im currently building a home. one of the biggest issues is FAR which is very much driven by local laws. are you intending on addressing that at some point ?

looks great btw. congrats

Thank you! After we get through building out the basic design tooling, we plan to get more into designing a specific plot of land and will look at adding zoning related contraints.

What happened to kit homes and plan books? Rather that bring down the cost of custom design, can we bring down the cost of partially pre-fabricated, modern code-compliant homes that still resemble something traditional (not a shipping container home)?

That said, I think this is neat because I’m buying a condo and knowing what’s even possible (physically, allowed by code, etc) seems more art than science. Getting answers usually involves bringing someone on-site, and almost nothing can be DIY’d anymore (either due to permits, HOA, complexity, etc)

This is interesting and cool for entertainment, but it's extremely hard to picture using this as a replacement for an architect.

We're building an ADU right now and the floorplan design was a very small part of what our architect did. So much more of the value came from the relationships he has with the structural and geotechnical engineers we used as well as the relationship with our city building department.

This really strikes me as a product in search of a problem.

Maybe a homeowner could use this for initial planning before finding an architect to use, but at that point you're competing with pencil and paper.

The benefits were in communication and relationship arbitrage? Surely both of those can be automated over time.

This is just one aspect but it’s still useful. Many people want to see a house and say “please help me make that”. In Australia there’s a set of house patterns that reduce the overhead of just landing a design and pushing it through the admin hurdles.

As counterpoint. I’m also building an ADU and no architect was needed. I had a drafter iterate on a layout document, most of it was deciding things like windows, door and cabinet layout. It’s not super necessary but informative to layout out MEPs (cost $800.) Although, we didn’t need colored or 3D renders, not value added for us.

From there, I kicked the PDF to a completely unrelated structural engineer that gave engineering specs, a few extra drawings that are standard copy pastes from his previous efforts, and his stamp (cost $600.)

From there, I had everything I needed to get accurate bids from general contractors and permits. Nobody needs to have any special city level connections in my major US city if you follow general code standards along the way they have to approve it. The GC knows what the on site inspectors will pass/fail as sometimes they play by different rules. At the end of the day, GC can always pull out the code book and prove an inspector wrong. Doing so tactfully is part of their jobs as inspectors are a revolving door and not always as knowledgeable as you’d think they should be.

Note. I don’t live in an area where seismic is an issue.

Completely agree with this. Most cities in the US are not that strict. Those cities are where building actually happen. Not in LA, Bay Area, etc, etc.

Majority of homes being constructed in the US are done in areas where as long as you follow the general code standards, you'll be able to get approval. This is why template house plan websites exist.

A very standard process for a builder is buy or use a template -> make tweaks with a drafter -> structural engineer for additional structural documents and stamping (liability) -> submit for permitting.

This opens the market for a tool like ours. In the short term, it won't be as helfpul in strict markets, just pure ideation, but over time that'll change with the model learning how to ingest local codes standards for designing within.

It looks great! I've built a few houses at this point and honestly always find this ideation part a major pain. Not that it's huge but the $800 could have been closer to $100-200 if we just had more firm convictions when starting the conversation, we ended up about 6-7 revisions total which was wasteful (paying by hour). I will be sure to try this tool on my next project.

Features like detailed framing plans, siding/wall/roof/insulation/etc all the detail cross-section drawings would be welcome additions. Especially if I could then tag the product type for each layer and it produced an inventory/shopping list. I think this is closer to what BIM software does but would be great to have even as a DIYer/GC.

How much structural and geotechnical detail does an ADU need?

That's one of the many questions that you trust a competent architect to handle!

I do a lot of work in the AEC space. This is an interesting idea but I don't find the results very compelling. There are huge houseplan catalogs out there full of mediocre plans. I'm guessing this is trained on that sort of data as both the floorplans and the elevations look more like what you would get from those catalogs, and not what you would get from hiring an architect.

That's cool. What kind of work?

It is more of that data. Most people can't afford an architect and almost everyone who buys a templated plan from one of those sites ends up changing it for another $5k-$15k with a drafter (lower cost) or architect (higher cost).

For a lot of people, they like a house, but they want to fit it to their needs and don't know how.

We are hoping to bridge the gap through lowering the cost to ideate and iterate on home designs.

I'm struggling to see how this could lower the cost to ideate here, almost all of the designs I can see on your page would require re drafting/designing it would be more beneficial for people to look at homes that have already been built compared to an AI generation with no real world grounding. Also who is paying for the compute to generate these floor plans and renders? This would have to turn into a paid service eventually im assuming.

ADU's are extremely popular in California. Are you going to add support for designing ADU/garage conversions?

Right now we are focused on single-family ground-up design. There are people using it for ADUs, but it's not trained to do that well.

We plan to make the model better for ADU's after we get through multi-story houses :)

This looks awesome for showing an architect what you have in mind. I would not try to replace one though.

That's definitely a good use case. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible to design a home. We aren't trying to replace an architect. It'll allow people who couldn't do it before to now do it (0->1) and empower people who know what they are doing to do much more (1->100) like vibe coding has done.

I’ve build something similar but bottom up instead of top down. Happy to meet and share insights. Demo: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DauZYdsUQ1g

Super cool! What's your email?

This is a really interesting product and the demos look really good too! I was just wondering whether or not there has been any plans of implementing a chat feature into Drafted. Looking to learn more about what you guys are building.

Thank you! At some point we will. We are working through the basic generative interactions mechanics and manual editing to allow for people who need to get more nuanced to do so and then will incorporate a chat layer for those that want to stay at a high level (pure intention level).

Just tried out the app itself, and from first glance, it looks good. As I started to click around, I noticed that a lot of features were unresponsive, such as when I was trying to select my palette or view my profile - the buttons were unclickable. I also have some other questions as well. Mind if I shoot you a connection and message on LinkedIn so we can discuss this further?

Im curious, where did you get all the training data? Actual blueprints? Or it the training data pictures of homes? Or a mix?

They are actual blueprints!

Looks really cool, as both a software developer and a custom home builder I think this is great.

I noticed it can only draw hip roofs.

You need more alot more training data of good looking houses. I'm sure it's taken a lot of effort to get these things working, but these houses are lacking some character to me.

I think this is a great idea. Have you thought about trying to hire architects or builders?

Is there something similar to this which lets you visualize floor plans from listed homes when you are house hunting?

I haven't seen anything that can do that. If you're wanting to walkthrough a house that's listed, some houses have 3D walkthroughs.

We are working on being able to upload a floor plan to start editing, which hopefully opens this door a bit.

Going to give it a try! Would love to see an option for an engineering stamp for brace walls, hold downs, etc.

Let me know how it goes!

Engineering would be awesome! We want to get to training the model on structural constraints. We will start with basic foundation drawing, but will get deeper as we have the bandwidth to do it.

As others have mentioned, building custom homes is the last place I'd use AI.

But if you're considering a pivot, interior design would be a great direction!

Given the space and furniture I have or could buy, what are my alternatives for flow and light and usability? What if energy or allergens are an issue?

This could engage users and has natural add-on's for buying things that would help monetize with price discrimination. End-users could be happy to explore, but you might have more features for designers.

You could fine-tune based on all the home-decorating videos and materials, add MCP for physical models (layout/positioning, environment), and use video models for ingesting current and visualizing results.

This is really cool!

First thing that came to mind is that I would use this for a sim city style video game

We've had people design a house in the software and then recreate it in the sims. We also added .GLB file types because game designers were wanting to put houses in their video games.

I couldn't believe all the negative feedback, so I took a good look on the homepage too. Yeah, it's all AI slop, only it's funded by YC. Honestly, for me, I don't see myself using this. I might as well start from a 2d sketch on my notebook for some ideas and wire up Claude with blender. I think an average user might just ask ChatGPT or Gemini to give them some ideas. This is one of those products where you might try it out, but there is no recurring model here. Home building by itself isn't a recurring exercise, so not really sure. It could possibly work as a Pinterest of sort for housing plans, but even then, I could very well use Pinterest for this as it already has a great collection of housing plan ideas. For example:

https://pinterest.com/nairveena20/houseplans/

I like your house plan collection. Thanks for sharing.

You should try creating a house and let me know what you think.

How well could this work for other zones? like not in USA?

We have people in almost every country use the product, but we need to add metric system for it to be more relevant. There are likely much different codes as well and this has been trained on US houses. It can still function as an ideation tool, but will need more make the exports more usable.

Why do all the plans on the homepage have hip roofs?

Does this allow for also doing exterior work ?

Do you support 2 story homes?

Doesn't look like it. From their FAQ: "Drafted is focused on single-level floor plans today. Multi-story homes, second floors, and basements are in progress and expected to become available soon."

I'd love to see a two storey use case in the future! I have a few designs for a small plot of land in Toronto (2500 sqft lot) and would love to try and make alterations based on my zoning constraints.

Yeah - we are working on adding multi-story in the next 2 months.

I'd love to have you try it :D

Zoning constraints will likely be another few months beyond multi-story.

Great product from a great team!

Thank you :)

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