Questions and answers
Machinae Build turns a plain-English description of a steel building into a 3D design and a deterministic code check, in about the time it takes to read this paragraph. It is a design and a code check. It is not a set of permit drawings, and it never replaces a licensed engineer.
What is Machinae Build?
Machinae Build is a web tool that designs a steel building from a sentence. You type something like 60x100 shop with two 14 ft roll-up doors, 16 ft eave, in Austin TX, and it returns a three-dimensional building you can turn around, edit by dragging, and send out for a quote — together with a list of the US code requirements that apply to it.
It is aimed at the person buying the building: a shop owner, a farmer, a contractor pricing a job. It assumes no drawing software, no engineering vocabulary and no training.
What do I actually get from one description?
A 3D model of the building, an editable specification, and a code report against it. The model is drawn in your browser and can be rotated and walked around. The specification is the structured version of what you asked for — dimensions, structural system, openings, colours — and every part of it can be changed by dragging a handle or typing a correction. The code report lists what is blocked, what is required for a permit, and what is worth doing.
Where a deployment has exports switched on, a frozen revision can also produce a GLB model file, a quantity CSV and an RFQ PDF.
Is this a set of construction drawings?
No. This is a design and a code check, not a permit set and not stamped engineering. No output from this product may be submitted for a permit or used to build from on its own.
Every building still needs a licensed engineer's stamp for its county, and the engineer designs to the loads that county adopts. What this product does is get the shape, the system and the requirements right before you pay anybody — which is the part that is usually wrong when a quote comes back three weeks later.
How much does Machinae Build cost?
Five designs are free before you are asked for anything at all. Registering adds ten more. Beyond that, where checkout is switched on, a pack of one hundred designs is five dollars, sold through Lemon Squeezy as merchant of record.
There is no card form anywhere in the product, no subscription and no trial that expires. The five anonymous designs are counted against a cookie, and the ten sign-up designs are granted once per account.
Do I need an account or a credit card to try it?
No account and no card for the first five designs. An email address and a phone number are asked for after that, because a quote request has to reach a person who can answer it. Signing in with Google or GitHub works as well as an email and password.
What kinds of buildings does it handle?
Six recognised types: barn, warehouse, hangar, shop, garage and general commercial. That covers workshops, storage, riding arenas, equipment sheds, single-aircraft and twin hangars, and distribution buildings.
Openings can be roll-up doors, barn doors, personnel doors, windows and louvers. Attached structures — a lean-to on either side, a porch, a canopy, a cupola, dormers, skylights, a silo — are described in the same sentence, not configured separately.
What sizes and clear spans are possible?
Up to roughly 300 feet of clear span, but which system you land in is decided
by the span and eave height you ask for. The three systems and their limits,
as set in config/system-limits.json:
- Tube steel — typically 40 ft clear span, 60 ft at the practical limit, eaves to 16 ft. Carports, garages, small shops, agricultural storage.
- Cold-formed (light-gauge) steel truss — typically 50 ft, 70 ft at the practical limit, eaves to 26 ft. Workshops, small warehouses, single-engine hangars.
- Red-iron PEMB (rigid frame) — typically 150 ft, to about 300 ft custom-engineered, eaves to 100 ft. Distribution, manufacturing, jet and twin hangars, crane bays.
Sizes are given and returned in feet.
Which structural system will it choose, and can I override it?
The system is routed from the clear span and eave height, not chosen by the buyer. Ask for a 90 ft clear span in light-gauge and the product says so rather than quoting it: selling a wide span as light-gauge is the specific mis-sale the router exists to prevent.
You can ask for a different system, and where it will not carry what you described you get a blocker explaining which limit it exceeds.
What does the code check actually check?
It checks the design against a fixed rule set: ASCE 7-22 with IBC 2024 for structure, 2021 IECC and ASHRAE 90.1-2019 for energy, and AISI S100, S240 and S400 for cold-formed framing. On top of that it checks the things US buyers reliably forget — insulation for the climate zone, condensation control, ventilation, gutters, doors sized for what has to drive through them, and stamped drawings for the actual county loads.
Findings come back at four levels: blocker (cannot be built as described), required (needed for a permit or code compliance), recommended (a common and costly omission) and info.
Is the code check generated by an AI model?
No. The code check is deterministic arithmetic against a versioned rule file, so the same design produces the same findings on every request, and every rule is reviewable and testable. The model is not asked for an opinion about code and the schema it is given contains no advisory fields.
The language model has exactly one job: turning your sentence into a structured specification. Everything downstream of that — routing the structural system, checking the rules, computing quantities, drawing the building — is ordinary code.
Which AI model does it use?
Whichever model the deployment pins; the product is deliberately not tied to
one vendor. The catalogue in config/models.json defaults to
deepseek-v4-flash and also covers Anthropic Claude, Moonshot
Kimi, NVIDIA-hosted models, anything reachable through OpenRouter, and a
local server speaking the OpenAI shape. Changing the model is one environment
variable, not a code change.
Does it use my county's snow and wind loads?
It asks for the build site rather than inventing values for it. Ground snow, design wind and the IECC climate zone are set by the county, not the state, and every one of them changes the building — so where the site is unknown the product says the value is unknown instead of filling in a plausible number.
How long does a design take?
About a minute in ordinary use, and no average is published because none has been measured across real traffic. What is fixed is the input: a description is capped at 500 characters, and a failed model call is retried up to three times with exponential backoff before you are told it failed.
What are the limits and risks?
The three that matter, stated plainly:
- It is not engineering. Nothing it produces is stamped, and nothing it produces is a permit document.
- Manufacturer maxima are not guarantees. The upper span and eave figures come from manufacturers' published sales pages and sit at the edge of feasibility; they are labelled as such in the rule file and must be verified per project with stamped engineering.
- Code adoption is uneven. The rule set names current model codes, and jurisdictions adopt them late and unevenly. Always design to the locally adopted code and the county's load values.
What data does Machinae Build collect?
An email address and a phone number to create an account and route a quote, the building descriptions and designs you make, your IP address and browser user-agent at signup, and server logs. Passwords are stored only as a salted hash, and are never seen at all when you sign in with Google or GitHub.
There are no advertising cookies, no third-party analytics, and no fonts, scripts or images loaded from anyone else's servers. The single outbound third-party request is an optional IP-location lookup used to prefill the build site, and it is off unless you allow it. The privacy policy and the cookie page list all of it in full.
Do you train AI models on my designs?
No. There is no training pipeline in this product; it calls a model provider's API and receives a specification back. The text you type to describe a building is sent to that provider to be processed; your email address, phone number and password never form part of that request.
Can I change the building after it is generated?
Yes, in two ways. You can drag the building itself — move a door along a wall, resize an opening, drag it up to the storey above, move or remove a roof vent — and every change is undoable. Or you can type the correction in words and let it re-plan that part of the design.
What do I need to run it?
A browser with WebGL 2.0, which every current desktop and mobile browser has. There is nothing to install and nothing to download. A phone works for looking; a laptop is better for editing.
Are there reviews or case studies?
None are published yet. There are no customer testimonials, no named references and no measured outcomes on this site, because there are none to report honestly — and inventing them was not an option.
How does it compare to SketchUp, Revit or a manufacturer's configurator?
The difference is who does the work and what comes back. SketchUp and Revit are drawing tools: you model the building, and they do not tell you whether what you drew can be built or what code requires of it. A manufacturer's configurator prices that manufacturer's catalogue. This takes a sentence, chooses the structural system from the span, and returns the code requirements with the design.
What it does not do is replace any of them downstream. There is no permit set, no shop drawing and no stamped calculation here.
Does it integrate with anything?
Quote requests can be delivered into HubSpot or Pipedrive where a deployment configures it, and exports can produce a GLB model, a quantity CSV and an RFQ PDF. There is no public API for third-party integrations.
Can Machinae Build be self-hosted?
Yes. It is a single Node.js service — Node 22.5 or newer — with SQLite databases on one volume and one model provider API key. The software itself is proprietary; running your own copy is a matter for the copyright holder, not a licence you get by downloading it.
Where does it work?
The United States. Dimensions are in feet, and the code check is written against US model codes and county-adopted loads. Nothing stops the 3D design from being useful elsewhere, but the code report would not be.
Who runs Machinae Build, and how do I reach a person?
Machinae Build is developed and operated by Elena Denezhkina, who holds the copyright in it. The contact page reaches a person — for a quote, an account problem, a privacy request or a security report.
Where is the rest of the documentation?
How to use it is the step-by-step guide, written for somebody who does not use computers much. Terms of Service states what the designs and code checks are and are not — section 3 is the one to read. Privacy and Cookies cover the data. Assistants and crawlers should start at /llms.txt, which indexes every page and links the plain-Markdown copy of each.