Marcio Miike Jr. / Notes

Checking a drawing against the standard

A design check asks one question many times: does this drawing meet this rule? By hand, one check took an engineer about 45 minutes. Broken into small questions, a language model answers them in about a minute.

Once For each drawing split the rule the place it applies asks Standard the design rules Checks one rule each Drawing to be checked One check one rule, one place Model judges it Meets nothing to do Does not meet into the report Cannot tell to the engineer Once For each drawing split the rule place asks Standard the design rules Checks one rule each One check one rule, one place Drawing to be checked Model judges it Meets nothing to do Does not meet into the report Cannot tell to the engineer
The standard is split into checks once. For each drawing, every check becomes one small question: this rule, at this place. The model answers it one of three ways.

Reading the picture

The top row happens once. The design standard is a long document, and a model asked to “check this drawing against the standard” will miss things. So the standard is first rewritten as a list of checks, one rule each.

Then, for each drawing, every check collects two things: the text of its rule, and the place in the drawing where that rule applies. That pair is the green box. The model sees one pair at a time and judges it.

There are three answers, and the third matters as much as the others. When the model cannot tell, it says so, and the engineer looks.

Which mistake matters

A checker can be wrong in two ways. It can flag something that is fine, which costs the engineer a minute. Or it can miss a real problem, which costs far more later.

So the number to watch is the share of real problems the system catches. Over this project, that share rose by 20%.

What it did

I ran this project for a construction consultancy from September 2024 to February 2025. The check and its report went from about 45 minutes to about one. The company then approved the budget to take it toward everyday use.

It is one of the five systems in the chart.