Claude Opus 5.5 Can Draw Permit-Level Architectural Drawings
stephenjgallagher.substack.com
stephenjgallagher.substack.com
Edit: I'm not sure how fast any of this will be adopted with how slowly things move in construction. I'm surprised people are still using AutoCAD and making a profit.
Now, I know, I know, I'm about to be hit with some bad faith retort about skyscrapers and bridges and other things engineered on a fine margin falling down. Your average multi tenant commercial building, your average parking lot, your average retaining wall ain't that. And that's the stuff that's the bulk of what PE firms do.
(Amusingly the pelican-on-a-bicycle test doesn't capture this very effectively, despite testing 2D drawing with SVG - because pelicans can't write bicycles, so the results are inherently unrealistic. Having the model create an architectural diagram from a concept sketch is a much more useful 2D test.)
If you want any, feel free to grab em by the source (MIT I think ?) and if you have better ones - please add !!
Might be nice to scope out where exactly it is good and where it is lacking ; residential vs commercial vs industrial , A vs S vs MEP, style of architecture? We need better benchmarking here to substantiate.
A build permit simply says that they reasonably believe you can build the thing such that it will pass inspections. It doesn’t mean that every single detail will be finalized or correct.
Have you considered the possibility that they meant exactly what they stated? That the output is good enough to reasonably believe it can be built and pass inspection,but it may still include flaws in details?
If they cost money then it sounds like there's a potential incentive there for people to create a marketplace for them.
The drawings can be resolved from a data-enriched 3D model, which is normally where the hard hours go.
That being said, I’m certain they’ll be extremely useful in other areas such as review, auditing, etc - if those even matter for architects.
Lots of examples, sketches, and revisions, especially for the favorite model mentioned:
“Opus 5.5’s initial draft was the best, so I gave it the most feedback”
This shows that an experienced person is still needed:
“With the right guidance, Opus 5.5 is arguably better than the low end of the human market.”
Furthermore, the same problems arise as in software development:
“And, even after my redlines, the details contain some subtle errors that wouldn’t be made by a skilled architect with experience in this type of construction.”
And later:
“more than 15,000 lines of Python code”
as well as
“it took Opus 5.5 twelve hours to draft the house set, and the compute cost a few hundred dollars.”
The exact costs would have been interesting to know, since it’s safe to assume that prices will continue to rise (and must), which makes the comparison with a human interesting again—one who, in the end, will be needed once more.
Huh??
Sometimes these things make sense, but a lot of the time the work was already recently completed 3 years ago and yet they'll make you do it again. Last month I paid $3,900.00 to get 3 tiny trees and one medium sized oak surveyed here in the Bay Area. It's really about politics and control- the city wants to make a bunch of fake jobs and collect very high fees along the way.
Removing a requirement might just leave someone else paying a much higher price, potentially with their property, their clean water, or even their life.
So the real answer is to reframe laws as applying to commercial operations, projects over a certain size, non-homeowners, etc. But of course the corpos cry foul over this, and would much rather you put your effort into working to repeal all regulations so they can operate without constraints.
Pragmatically, this is why I live in an area where if I wake up and decide I don't like a particular tree, it can be on the ground within a couple of hours. And most of that time is eating breakfast.
1) Permitting is slow and, at some point, if you fuck it up big enough, the inspectors will probably take further steps, but otherwise not care much. You simply won't get a permit.
2) Who will care a lot are the builders and creditors. Building is expensive and if there's a couple of months of set back because of your fantasy drawings, that's not going to be in your favor.
Which is not so say AI planning is not going to happen. It will. But at that point it's probably mostly going to work.
And at the same time I feel bad for inspectors being 5-10 years away from retirement, or worse, 5 years into the business. All inspectors in general, beyond some further construction engineering professionals and those making software for them.