Last week I did my first bid in ages. I had taken some time off to build the software, so it was good to be back at doing actual estimating. It was an electrical project but the scope was unbelievably confusing. It instantly reminds me what I hate most about estimating. Spending hours going through the drawings, trying to make sense of the scope of works and put it all together. It feels like when bidding, you spend 90% of your time trying to work out what the client actually wants you to price. If you were going to spend $5m+ on a contract, surely you should spend a few hours trying to clearly articulate what you want them to price? But clients never seem to do it properly.... What do you hate most about estimating?

The term operating system gets thrown around a lot. It makes sense if you work with AI every day, less so if you're in construction and super busy. The benefits of having one are very real though. At its core it's bringing your business context, projects, history and processes together so the AI knows what you want, where to find it and how to use it every time. Think of a new site engineer. With no walkthrough, no SharePoint access and no past examples, their first site report is going to be pretty bad. Give them all of that and they'll do a pretty good job. It comes down to four parts: - The tool, usually Claude or ChatGPT - Context, so it knows your business, projects, team and where everything lives - Memory, so what happens on Friday is known on Monday - Workflows, how your business actually runs, captured in skills You're still doing the thinking, the AI just pulls out the information and drafts it up. I go through what it looks like for construction in this video. https://youtu.be/_h891ucQ898

A PM's week mostly goes on admin, like minutes, registers, reports and chasing people, and on the surprises nobody picked up until they cost days and money. AI is good at the admin, and set up properly it helps with the surprises too. You don't need to start with anything fancy. I'd build up in this order: - Give it one job, like turning a meeting transcript into action items or a first pass on a submittal review. - Connect a Claude or ChatGPT project to a desktop copy of your job folder. It finds the LDs itself and pulls the spec and site diaries into an RFI draft. - Have it review your work. Check a bid against the spec for anything missed, or list the week's must-do actions. - Turn the jobs you repeat into skills, saved step-by-step instructions with your templates that the AI follows every time. - Schedule the ones that keep track of things, like a daily register pass that proposes updates for you to approve. My first must-do list came back far too wordy. Start with a short prompt anyway and tune it from there. Once you have a few skills, one's output feeds the next. I check each before it moves on, because you're responsible for what goes out. I go through the whole thing in the video.

Hi! Excited to be here. I am the co-owner of a pool construction company in North Texas. We are a small design/build firm, 100% woman owned and operated. I am always looking for more efficient ways to streamline our processes, automate what we can automate, and give Claude more work to do.

Curious what everyone’s running. Here’s mine: • JobTread — PM, estimating, budgets, and the file system: plans, drawings, receipts, job docs all live here • QuickBooks — accounting • Notion — business brain / SOPs + cost history • Airtable — Contractor OS data layer • Claude / ChatGPT — the glue. Skills + MCP connectors so I’m not re-entering the same data three times Google Drive is still in there, but honestly it’s redundant — it only exists as a staging spot until I get receipt capture running properly through the agents. Once that’s clean it comes out. What are you running — and what’s sitting in your stack that you know you don’t actually need?