I built a tool that can crawl a construction blueprint — without using AI
I work in construction and also build software for the industry. Lately I've been playing around with a problem that comes up all the time: opening a huge PDF plan set and trying to make sense of what's actually on the drawings.
So I built this little experiment.
You drop a PDF drawing into the browser and it crawls the sheet, picks up things like rooms, dimensions, notes, labels, doors, etc., and puts that information into a visual interface next to the drawing.
The funny part is that there's no AI doing the interpretation.
I wanted to see how far I could get by working with the actual structure and text that's already inside a CAD-exported PDF.
I'm thinking this could eventually be useful as a first step before giving a drawing to an AI model. Instead of asking AI to stare at a giant plan and figure everything out, give it a structured representation of the drawing first.
This is still very much an experiment. Here's a quick 30-second look at it.
Curious what people here think — does this kind of preprocessing make sense for AI working with technical drawings, or am I overcomplicating it?