Use AI to calculate your BOM

I talk to robots more than people

Okay that’s an exaggeration. But not by much. I use Claude and ChatGPT constantly. Google is dead to me. It’s just ads now. I use Perplexity for searching.

Why?

Because I can show Claude a screenshot of my floor plan and say: “Calculate the volume of concrete for these footings if they are 1.2m x 1.2m x 0.4m”. And it just does it.

Or ask: “How many AAC blocks for this wall height?”

Warning: It lies

AI lies. A lot. It’s a “people pleaser”. If you ask “Is this beam design good?”, it will say “Yes! Great job!” because it wants you to be happy. You have to bully it. Ask: “Critique this design. Tell me why it will fail.” Then it tells you the truth.

Also, never trust it with prices. It thinks a bag of cement costs 100 pesos (I wish) or 500 dollars. It has no idea about current Philippine hardware store prices. Use it for volume (how many bags), not cost (how much pesos).

Input your own prices. “Assume cement is 230 pesos. Calculate total.”

The “O1” trick

OpenAI has this new model “Starting with O1”. It “thinks” before answering. It takes like 60 seconds to reply. Use that one for math. The fast models are bad at math. The slow ones are okay. Still check the work though.

Summary

I am not replacing my structural engineer with ChatGPT. (Please don’t do that). But for quick checks? For “sanity checking” my contractor’s BOM? It’s a superpower. Just don’t trust it blindly.