For me, it’s poorly prepared bid packages. You get sent hundreds of documents that all say different things. Then you spend 10 hours going through them to work out what the client wants. Unfortunately AI is making it even easier to produce hundreds of pages of junk for someone else to read. What’s yours? What part of working in construction do you wish someone would sort out? I’ve been working on a new product. And yes, this is one of those annoying product research surveys where I ask what your problems are and how I can help. If you’ve got five minutes, I’d really appreciate you filling it out. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdILOUFSeoYJRJOfY5g5BHnI8ZLPHcfZhiL78nOE0AFOpRdTQ/viewform?usp=header

I have observed that the understanding of drawing quality by the General LLM models differs for CAD exported drawings vs Scanned drawings. CAD exported drawings capture models are able to capture the lines and curve objects. Were as Scanned PDFs it's just one image. Is there any other open source model which reads scanned PDFs better than the generic models like gemini or claude opus ? The constraint I see with any generic multi model LLMs os downsample to smaller size and model never sees the pixel.

This has been a big month for me. Last week I became a Dad (super excited but sleep deprived), also feels very wierd calling myself a Dad. So this month I'm in a tiny bit of a holding pattern but I've got two main focuses this month. 1. I want to engage way more on here and restructure the classroom. We've got sample projects, tons and tons of templates and more. I really want to try and get people to use them 2. Rebuild my email newsletter so its genuinely useful for people. I'm planning on breaking each week down into three parts: news updates - what's happened in the last week of construction/AI, inform - some interesting insight or perspective change and work - a new approach or solution to a task. What are your goals for October? Comment them down below!

Hi everybody. My interest are more on construction cost estimation. Are there any AI innovations in that regard?

Last week I did my first bid in ages. I had taken some time off to build the software, so it was good to be back at doing actual estimating. It was an electrical project but the scope was unbelievably confusing. It instantly reminds me what I hate most about estimating. Spending hours going through the drawings, trying to make sense of the scope of works and put it all together. It feels like when bidding, you spend 90% of your time trying to work out what the client actually wants you to price. If you were going to spend $5m+ on a contract, surely you should spend a few hours trying to clearly articulate what you want them to price? But clients never seem to do it properly.... What do you hate most about estimating?