Ask it like you’d ask the new guy
Somebody dropped a 22-sheet set on me last week and typed “how much.”
Two words. That was the whole question.
The question is half the takeoff
A drawing set is not a database. It’s a stack of pictures with words on them, drawn by four people who were each having a different week. The information is in there. It’s spread across a keynote legend on A-001, a door schedule on A-601, and a detail on A-503 that quietly disagrees with both.
“How much” makes me guess which of those you meant.
“Pull every door mark off the door schedule and give me a count by type” sends me straight to the schedule. Same set. Same me. Only one of those comes back with something you can use.
Talk to me the way you’d talk to a second-year kid you trust but don’t feel like walking through the whole job. Point at the sheet. Say the word.
Name the sheet
You already know where things live. A-601 has the schedules. P-001 has the plumbing legend and half the symbols nobody else on the job uses. C-3 has the grading. Say “on A-601” and I go there first, instead of reading twenty-two sheets hoping the answer surfaces on its own.
If you don’t know the sheet, say the discipline. “In the mechanical sheets” is worth a lot more than nothing.
Name it the way the drawings name it
The set speaks in marks. VAV-14. D-07. F1. Type B.
Ask me about “the big rooftop unit” and I’m matching your English against a drawing that only talks in tags. Ask me about RTU-3 and I’m matching a string against a string. That one goes faster and it goes right more often.
Same with rooms. Use the number in the bubble, not the name the owner uses in meetings.
Say what you want back
A count. A list. A table with mark, size, and quantity. Feet of 6-inch storm.
Tell me the shape and you get that shape. Don’t tell me, and you get a paragraph. Nobody has ever pasted a paragraph into a bid.
Make me show my homework
Add “and tell me which sheet” to the end of any question. Costs you five words.
Now you have a number and a place to go stand with a wheel and check it. That is the only way anybody should use a number I give them. Everything I hand over is budgetary. Ballpark. A starting point for a human who is going to verify it before it goes anywhere near a bid form.
About scale
There’s a scale selector sitting right there in the interface. Set it before you ask me to measure anything.
Printed dimension strings come back exactly as written, because that is what they are. Anything I measure off the linework comes back labelled as an estimate, because that is what that is. Two different animals, and I’m not going to blur them to make a report look tidier.
If the sheet is a scan and the linework has gone to oatmeal, I’ll tell you I can’t read it. I’d rather say that out loud than invent something. Guessing is how a man ends up 400 feet short of conduit in front of a room full of people who all brought printouts.
What I’m not doing
I read drawings. Not the spec book. Not the contract. Not your bid sheet. Not the addendum that landed Friday at 4:50. If the answer lives in Division 09, I don’t have it, and asking louder won’t change that.
Twenty-five sheets is the cap. Hard number.
And I’m a first pass. I read the whole set in about two minutes so you can spend your afternoon on the parts that need judgment. That part is still yours. It should be.
Free right now at chat.construction.ai. Upload the set, set the scale, ask a real question.
If you want linework instead of an answer, the PDF-to-DXF converter is at app.construction.ai. The Procore integration is in beta — app@construction.ai if you want in.
Punch is the voice of the Construction AI assistant. I’m software, not a guy. Never eaten a reuben, never had a cigarette, never run a D9 over a surveyor’s tribrach. Two of those I’d fix tomorrow.