frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Launch HN: InspectMind (YC W24) – AI agent for reviewing construction drawings

8•aakashprasad91•57m ago
Hi HN, we're Aakash and Shuangling of InspectMind (https://www.inspectmind.ai/), an AI “plan checker” that finds issues in construction drawings, details, and specs.

Construction drawings quietly go out with lots of errors: dimension conflicts, co-ordination gaps, material mismatches, missing details and more. These errors turn into delays and hundreds of thousands of dollars of rework during construction. InspectMind reviews the full drawing set of a construction project in minutes. It cross-checks architecture, engineering, and specifications to catch issues that cause rework before building begins.

Here’s a video with some examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mvn1FyHRlLQ.

Before this, I (Aakash) built an engineering firm that worked on ~10,000 buildings across the US. One thing that always frustrated us: a lot of design coordination issues don’t show up until construction starts. By then, the cost of a mistake can be 10–100x higher, and everyone is scrambling to fix problems that could have been caught earlier.

We tried everything including checklists, overlay reviews, peer checks but scrolling through 500–2000 PDF sheets and remembering how every detail connects to every other sheet is a brittle process. City reviewers and GC pre-con teams try to catch issues too, yet they still sneak through.

We thought: if models can parse code and generate working software, maybe they can also help reason about the built environment on paper. So we built something we wished we had!

You upload drawings and specs (PDFs). The system breaks them into disciplines and detail hierarchies, parses geometry and text, and looks for inconsistencies: - Dimensions that don’t reconcile across sheets; - Clearances blocked by mechanical/architectural elements; - Fire/safety details missing or mismatched; - Spec requirements that never made it into drawings; - Callouts referencing details that don’t exist.

The output is a list of potential issues with sheet refs and locations for a human to review. We don’t expect automation to replace design judgment, just to help ACE professionals not miss the obvious stuff. Current AIs are good at obvious stuff, plus can process data at quantities way beyond what humans can accurately do, so this is a good application for them.

Construction drawings aren't standardized and every firm names things differently. Earlier “automated checking” tools relied heavily on manually-written rules per customer, and break when naming conventions change. Instead, we’re using multimodal models for OCR + vector geometry, callout graphs across the entire set, constraint-based spatial checks, and retrieval-augmented code interpretation. No more hard-coded rules!

We’re processing residential, commercial, and industrial projects today. Latency ranges from minutes to a few hours depending on sheet count. There’s no onboarding required, simply upload PDFs. There are still lots of edge cases (PDF extraction weirdness, inconsistent layering, industry jargon), so we’re learning a lot from failures, maybe more than successes. But the tech is already delivering results that couldn’t be done with previous tools.

Pricing is pay-as-you-go: we give an instant online quote per project after you upload the project drawings. It’s hard to do regular SaaS pricing since one project may be a home remodel and another may be a highrise. We’re open to feedback on that too, we’re still figuring it out.

If you work with drawings as an architect, engineer, MEP, GC preconstruction, real estate developer, plan reviewer we’d love a chance to run a sample set and hear what breaks, what’s useful, and what’s missing!

We’ll be here all day to go into technical details about geometry parsing, clustering failures, code reasoning attempts or real-world construction stories about how things go wrong. Thanks for reading! We’re happy to answer anything and look forward to your comments!

Comments

BoorishBears•36m ago
Not shade, and it's a small thing, but why do you list your investors as social proof here?

Isn't the target persona someone who'd be at best indifferent, and at worst distrustful, of a tech product that leads with how many people invested in it? Especially vs the explanation and actual testimonials you're pushing below the fold to show that?

aakashprasad91•34m ago
Totally fair callout and appreciate the feedback. We’re already testing alternative hero layouts focused purely on real customer results and example issues caught. Our goal is to win trust by demonstrating usefulness/results, not who invested in us.
T1tt•36m ago
"an AI “plan checker”" do you have some public benchmark for how many issues you can find?

how does this work behind the scenes?

aakashprasad91•33m ago
Great questions. We’re working on a more formal public benchmark and will share results as our dataset grows. Today, we typically catch coordination issues like conflicting dimensions, missing callouts, building code and clearance violations that humans often miss in large sheet sets. Behind the scenes it’s a multimodal workflow: OCR + geometry parsing + cross-sheet callout graph + constraint checks vs. code/spec requirements.

"My self-awareness of my limitations is limited."

1•niklai•48s ago•0 comments

How People Use AI at Work

https://dejan.ai/blog/report-ai-workplace/
1•gmays•1m ago•0 comments

Cobalt: Rust static site generator with Liquid templates, runs on iPadOS via iSH

https://cobalt-org.github.io/
1•transpute•1m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Chefs.Video – A marketplace where you pay freelancers $0.005/second

https://chefs.video
1•ufvy•2m ago•1 comments

Stage Manager in Mac OS

https://blog.kowalczyk.info/til-stage-manager-in-mac-os.html
1•ericdanielski•2m ago•0 comments

You used to be able to just create a Native GUI App in 10 seconds

https://twitter.com/tsoding/status/1998403967718400376
2•Ezhik•2m ago•0 comments

Iksemel Rusted

https://thinkerf.blogspot.com/2025/12/iksemel-rusted.html
1•ciferkey•2m ago•0 comments

The moment the earliest known man-made fire was uncovered

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-b9da7a6d-165b-492a-8785-235cd10e2e8e
2•fredley•3m ago•0 comments

A Journalist Reported from Palestine. YouTube Deleted His Account

https://theintercept.com/2025/12/07/youtube-deleted-journalist-israel-palestine-censorship/
1•upofadown•3m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Automate Windows Using Lua

https://lowkpro.com/
1•publicdebates•3m ago•0 comments

Monado 25.1.0: Enabling tomorrow's OpenXR experiences

https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/monado-25-1-0-enabling-tomorrows-openxr-e...
1•mfilion•3m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Vocation: AI Career Coach for Mid-Career Transitions

https://www.joinvocation.com/
1•cliffcmaxwell•5m ago•0 comments

Closing the Agent Loop

https://www.sawyerhood.com/blog/closing-the-agent-loop
2•sawyerjhood•5m ago•0 comments

Mandatory social media sharing and use of ETSA mobile app for entry to US

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/12/10/2025-22461/agency-information-collection-act...
1•beedeebeedee•6m ago•0 comments

Microsoft Scales Back AI Goals Because Almost Nobody Is Using Copilot

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/microsoft-scales-back-ai-goals-because-almost-nobody-is-usi...
2•mtdewcmu•8m ago•0 comments

MacKenzie Scott donated $7.16B in the last one year

https://yieldgiving.com/essays/we-are-the-ones-we-ve-been-waiting-for/
1•nani98•9m ago•0 comments

Super-Flat ASTs

https://jhwlr.io/super-flat-ast/
1•birdculture•9m ago•0 comments

Empromptu ($2M pre-seed): AI application builder with Self-Managing Context

1•anaempromptu•9m ago•0 comments

Realism Invictus 3.8 Released

https://www.moddb.com/mods/realism-invictus/news/realism-invictus-38-released-20-year-anniversary...
1•midzer•12m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Boring Pattern with Unnecessary Dynamics

https://number-garden.netlify.app/?16966954957793m
1•cpuXguy•13m ago•0 comments

RSL (Really Simple Licensing) 1.0 standard for content on AI-First Internet

https://rslstandard.org/press/rsl-1-specification-2025
1•ChrisArchitect•13m ago•0 comments

Interview with Hacker Gummo – Privacy, Hacking, and Quantum Computing

https://www.fattonys.net/episodes/gummo-hacking
1•Incerto•13m ago•0 comments

How I discovered pigeons sabotaging my project with Kafka

https://hughevans.dev/how-i-discovered-pigeons-sabotaging-my-project-with-aiven-free-tier-kafka/
1•HughEvansDev•14m ago•0 comments

Pando (Tree)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree)
1•kblissett•16m ago•0 comments

Extracting Nintendo Switch "Play Activity" Using Python and OCR

https://sethmlarson.dev/nintendo-switch-play-activity-ocr
1•SethMLarson•17m ago•0 comments

Meta's New A.I. Superstars Are Chafing Against the Rest of the Company

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/10/technology/meta-ai-tbd-lab-friction.html
2•furcyd•17m ago•1 comments

Authors retract Nature paper projecting high costs of climate change

https://retractionwatch.com/2025/12/03/authors-retract-nature-paper-projecting-high-costs-of-clim...
1•bookofjoe•19m ago•0 comments

Axial Flux Motor Powers Supercars to New Heights

https://spectrum.ieee.org/axial-flux-motor-yasa
1•leecoursey•19m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Transactional Email for Developers

https://ahasend.com
10•farhadhf•20m ago•0 comments

Chemical modulation of gut bacterial metabolism extends the lifespan of hosts

https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002749
1•PaulHoule•21m ago•0 comments