TT5: No Hand Coding Required
March 6, 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!
Yesterday I ran an advanced workshop for the Revit Add-in Academy on Claude Code. The goal was straightforward: plan a tool, hand it off to Claude Code, and get a working Revit add-in out the other end with no hand-coding. We built a room data reporter from scratch in about twenty minutes.
The session's result went beyond a working add-in. It showed what AI-assisted development looks like now. If youā€™ve used AI for coding, you know the loop: describe what you want, copy the code, paste, test, tweak the prompt, repeat. The bottleneck wasnā€™t writing code; it was the constant context-switching between intent and production. Claude Code now separates those jobs well. I wrote more about it here.
That shift from tool user to tool director is showing up everywhere right now, from how students are being trained to how firms are buying hardware to what people are building just for fun. Here are five things worth your time this week.
#1. I Gave Claude a Photo, and It Built a Revit Family
In this article, I describe an AI-enhanced workflow I developed: you upload a product photo, answer a few questions, and get a working Revit family. The pipeline takes an image, converts it to a JSON file, and then converts the JSON file to Revit family elements via a custom add-in. Check out the demo video to see where AI and the family-creation workflow are headed.
Click here to read the article at ArchSmarter.
#2. Best Enterprise Workstation Laptops 2026
AEC Magazine rounded up the top enterprise mobile workstations for 2026, and this year's list features some genuinely interesting hardware. The unified memory architecture on a couple of these machines is worth understanding before your next hardware refresh. Click through to see which ones made the cut.
Click here to read the reviews at AEC Magazine.
#3. From Prompt to Portfolio
Students at Western Michigan University are weaving AI into their design workflows in ways that go well beyond the novelty stage. Worth reading if you want a preview of what the next generation of practitioners will look like when they walk through your door.
Click here to read the full article at Archinect.
#4. Dynamo Forum 2025 Winner
Someone built a working piano in Dynamo that plays Auld Lang Syne and lights up the keys in real time. No, seriously. Step 6 of the setup instructions is "pour a whiskey." Completely useless and completely worth five minutes of your day.
Click here to experience the awesomeness at DynamoBIM.
#5. Does This Explain Parkinson's Law?
Scott Young connects Parkinson's Law to endurance research, and the insight is genuinely useful: your brain paces your effort based on how long it thinks the work will last. Tighter deadlines and intentional recovery don't just feel better, they actually improve output.
Click here to read the article at Scott H. Young.
Hope you have a great rest of the week.
Michael
