TT5: Automate or stagnate
April 16, 2026
This weekly email is my curated selection of interesting and useful topics related to BIM, design, and technology. I aim to provide you with some good information and a few laughs along the way. So, what did I find interesting this week? Read down to find out!
I'm writing this from London, where I'm on vacation this week. Well, it’s mostly vacation. Tonight I'm giving a talk at Adamson Architects called "Automate or Stagnate: What AI Actually Means for Architects." A lot of the ideas I’m going to discuss tonight have been taking shape in my blog posts over the past couple of months. This week’s newsletter is a reading list for what I'll be presenting. Today’s five links follow one thread: what’s possible when architects start using AI to handle production work and focus on the decisions that matter.
Alright, here are five things to check out this week:
#1: We're All Software Designers Now
The role of "developer" on a software project has always been distinct from that of "product owner." With tools like Claude Code, that separation is now available to architects building Revit tools. This post explores what it means when AI takes the developer seat, and you take the product owner role, and why problem definition has become the skill that matters most.
Click here to read the full article at ArchSmarter.
#2: What Happens When You Give an AI Access to Your Revit Model
On a Sunday morning, I opened Revit, opened Claude, and started asking questions about a model in plain English. No C# code. No scripting. Just conversation. This post explains how an MCP server makes that possible, what the interaction actually looks like, and why the most interesting part is not the server itself but the discipline-specific toolbox you can build on top of it.
Click here to read the full article at ArchSmarter.
#3: I Gave Claude a Photo, and It Built a Revit Family
Upload a photo of a piece of furniture, answer a few questions, and get a working Revit family in the Family Editor. This post walks through the three-stage pipeline that makes it happen: Claude analyzes the image and generates a structured JSON file, a 3D browser viewer lets you check the geometry before anything touches Revit, and a custom add-in builds the family from the data. No manual modeling required.
Click here to read the full article at ArchSmarter.
#4: Can AI Convert a Floor Plan Sketch to a Revit Model?
A friend handed me a sketch of a residential renovation. I fed it to Claude instead of opening Revit. Thirty-five minutes later, I had a working model with walls, doors, windows, and rooms, all without modeling a single element myself. This post is an honest account of what that process looks like, what the AI got right, what it got wrong, and whether any of it is worth your time right now.
Click here to read the full article at ArchSmarter.
#5: Using AI as a Design Partner
Revit is a great documentation tool, but it is not a great design tool. This post explores a workflow in which AI handles the design logic, a lightweight browser-based viewer handles iteration, and Revit receives the finished result. The test case is a parking lot layout optimizer, but the pattern applies anywhere you want to move fast outside of Revit while keeping it as your coordination and documentation backbone.
Click here to read the full article at ArchSmarter.
That’s all from me. I hope you’re having a great week.
Michael
