It still builds the modern world by hand: read it, copy it, check it, sign it.
Truss & Beams carries the repetitive engineering work — reading, reconciling, checking and recording — so engineers spend less time buried in documents and more time making decisions.
The old pyramid becomes a smaller, faster engineering team.
The signature stays chartered.
A consultancy’s product is a signed engineering judgment. Its business model is a pyramid of billable people producing it. Every incumbent is structurally punished for making the work faster — which is why the method has barely changed in fifty years, and why the change will not come from inside them.
They are reading, transcribing, reconciling, tracing and formatting: a member size changed on the drawing but not in the calc; a bar schedule that disagrees with the markup; a comment register that no longer matches the current revision. The work is repetitive because the project record is fragmented — and machines are very good at fragmented records.
Truss & Beams reads the package, builds the project graph, recomputes deterministic checks, compares every revision, and returns the work: flags, comments, registers, submissions, traceable records. Language models read and sequence; deterministic engines compute; independent verifiers recompute. Nothing load-bearing is ever guessed.
The destination is not an industry without engineers. It is engineers freed to do the part only they can do. Every flag is dispositioned by a named human; every approval binds that human to a specific revision. Judgment stays human. The machine does everything before it.
Bring us a finished package where your own engineers raised comments. We show you which of those comments the machine reproduces — and which it misses. You score us against your own red pen.
The mechanical layer. The part that eats a senior engineer’s afternoon and a graduate’s week:
Concrete grade and mix, dimensions, rebar markup — location, reference, callout — and the bar bending schedule: bar count, bar type, dimensions, radius, anchorage and lap lengths.
Grade, element dimensions against the schedule, connection details: bolt and weld location and size.
Calc against drawing against spec. Whether every number carries through. Whether the shop drawings the fabricator sent back actually match the design drawings you issued.
That last one isn’t judgment. It’s spot-the-difference, run by hand, across two sets of drawings. We do it in minutes and we don’t get bored on page forty.
Whether the design is right. Whether the approach was sound. Whether the engineer’s judgment was good. That stays with the engineer, and so does the signature. The machine never computes a number and never approves anything for construction.
Superseded, already-checked, closed projects only. Under NDA. Marked-up check prints, comment registers, calculations, drawings, schedules, revisions. No live projects until the machine has earned it on closed work.
Independent checking of calculations, drawings, schedules, connections and shop drawings. The work every project already pays for, done deterministically and recorded completely.
The engine that checks a design can draft one. Design bases, option studies, load takedowns, code-checked sizing — proposed by the machine, directed and approved by the engineer.
Submissions, comments, change impact, golden-thread records, due diligence. The consultancy's operational layer, running on the same verified project graph the checks create.