04 Construction software · United States Shipped
Six tools built inside a live construction-tech platform
Over four months we built and repaired tools for the platform and the firms it serves, from a blog that publishes itself to a plan takeoff that cites its sources.
- Before
- A platform whose own engineers were leaving, with tools its clients needed half-built, slow or done by hand
- After
- Six tools running inside the platform, each with tests behind it and a record of what it did
Three of the six, in detail
- 26 of 26 posts approved by a person before the first unattended publish A publishing pipeline that now runs unattended on the platform's own blog
- 27 of 28 facts cited on a live takeoff run, the last one flagged Plan takeoff that cites every fact it reads, and flags the rest
- 110 active subcontractors tracked A certificate tracker for about 110 subcontractors, repaired and audited
- 3,734 to 7,975
- passing tests on the platform app, September
- 30 Sep
- first post published with nobody in the loop
- Plans, catalogue, bids
- Site briefs
- Certificates
- Cited quantities and quotes
- Published posts
- Tracked certificates
01 What changed
- The platform's own blog publishes on a schedule with nobody touching it
- Estimators get quantities with the plan fact behind them, and bids on one page
- Every tool was checked on a live run before it was called done
The full story The problem, how we approached it, and what we built
A construction-tech platform serves home builders, suppliers and other firms. Its founder needed tools built inside the live product while its own engineering team was thinning out. Over about four months we built or repaired six of them, each tested and checked on a live run before we called it done.
02 The problem
The platform's clients needed estimating, publishing and compliance tools, and some of what existed was half-built or breaking. Its own engineers were leaving.
Anything we built had to live inside a production platform with real clients on it, so nothing could go out on trust.
03 The approach
Each tool started from how the work was being done by hand, then was built inside the platform with tests, and checked on a live run before it was called done. Where we predicted what a fix would do, we wrote the prediction down first and checked it after.
Over the engagement the platform app's passing test suite grew from 3,734 to 7,975 tests. On 30 September the publishing pipeline put its first post live with nobody in the loop.
04 What we built
- Publishing pipeline: 26 posts approved by a person, then the first unattended publish on 30 September
- Plan takeoff that cites every fact it reads: 27 of 28 on a live run, the last one flagged for a person
- Quote builder matched against a 17,038-item catalogue, with 2,256 colliding part numbers re-keyed to zero
- Bid levelling: 362 bidders round-tripped through export and re-upload with none lost
- Certificate tracker: when a backfill we ran wrote duplicate rows, all 26 pairs were restored and each re-read to prove it
- Operations and maintenance manuals generated on the contractor's own template, then its standard turned into an automatic check