TT5: The Non-Sexy Work

April 23, 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!

Last week I gave a talk at Adamson Architects in London titled "Automate or Stagnate: What AI Actually Means for Architects." The room was full, and I got to meet some students from the Revit Add-in Academy and Claude Workflows for Architects who turned up in the audience. I'll have a full write-up of the event soon. A lot of this week's picks circle back to what I was trying to get at in the talk: the real value of AI and automation lives in the unglamorous work most people skip past, not in the headlines.

Alright, here are five things to check out this week: 

#1: Autodesk Revit 2027 - New AI and Graphics

Revit 2027 ships with Autodesk Assistant, the first built-in MCP server inside Revit. That matters because MCP lets an AI like Claude read a live Revit model's elements, parameters, and geometry directly, rather than working from exports or screenshots. Accelerated Graphics has also graduated from tech preview, meaning section box manipulation is now real-time. Archicad and Vectorworks have had this for over a decade.

Click here to read the full article at Architosh.

#2: The Creative Process

Bob Borson pushes back on the idea that creativity is about inspiration arriving like a gift basket. In practice, it's about disciplined judgment, knowing which ideas deserve to survive a budget, a schedule, and a room full of competing priorities. His argument: a strong creative process doesn't guarantee brilliance, but it does protect the firm from burning time and fee on ideas that never had a chance.

Click here to listen to the episode at Life of an Architect.

#3: Why AI Isn't Disrupting the Design Process (Yet)

Valentin Noves offers an unromantic take on why AEC hasn't been upended by AI the way software engineering has. His short answer: LLMs are probabilistic, buildings are precise. The gap between plausible and correct is where our industry thrives. The piece is a useful counterweight to the hype cycle, with a realistic timeline for when actual disruption might occur.

Click here to read the full article at e-verse

#4: The Non-Sexy Work

In this episode of the TRXL podcast, Evan Troxel talks to Charles Portelli, who co-leads the internal tools team at Perkins&Will. Their conversation is about why unglamorous work like spec sync, project setup automation, and data plumbing is what actually matters at large firms. Portelli's long game is an AI project assistant that knows the whole project, but the years of quiet data infrastructure have to come first. I gave this a listen on my morning walk. Well worth it!

Click here to listen to the episode at TRXL.

#5: How to Motivate Yourself to Exercise Regularly

Scott Young's honest account of what actually changed his exercise habits, which turns out to be less about willpower and more about removing decision-making from the process. The counterintuitive bit: aim for daily, not three-times-a-week, because inconsistent schedules force you to negotiate with yourself every morning. Start easier than you'd think necessary and let the habit build the identity rather than the other way around. A good read for me as I’m trying to build a better exercise habit.

Click here to read the full article at Scott H Young.

That's all from me. Hope you had a great week!

Michael