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- Hacker News
- I’ve build something similar but bottom up instead of top down. Happy to meet and share insights. Demo: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DauZYdsUQ1g
- Super cool! What's your email?by PrimalNick
- This looks awesome for showing an architect what you have in mind. I would not try to replace one though.by LoganDark
- That's definitely a good use case. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible to design a home. We aren't trying to replace an architect. It'll allow people who couldn't do it before to now do it (0->1) and empower people who know what they are doing to do much more (1->100) like vibe coding has done.by PrimalNick
- ADU's are extremely popular in California. Are you going to add support for designing ADU/garage conversions?
- Right now we are focused on single-family ground-up design. There are people using it for ADUs, but it's not trained to do that well.
We plan to make the model better for ADU's after we get through multi-story houses :)
by PrimalNick - I do a lot of work in the AEC space. This is an interesting idea but I don't find the results very compelling. There are huge houseplan catalogs out there full of mediocre plans. I'm guessing this is trained on that sort of data as both the floorplans and the elevations look more like what you would get from those catalogs, and not what you would get from hiring an architect.
- That's cool. What kind of work?
It is more of that data. Most people can't afford an architect and almost everyone who buys a templated plan from one of those sites ends up changing it for another $5k-$15k with a drafter (lower cost) or architect (higher cost).
For a lot of people, they like a house, but they want to fit it to their needs and don't know how.
We are hoping to bridge the gap through lowering the cost to ideate and iterate on home designs.
by PrimalNick - This is interesting and cool for entertainment, but it's extremely hard to picture using this as a replacement for an architect.
We're building an ADU right now and the floorplan design was a very small part of what our architect did. So much more of the value came from the relationships he has with the structural and geotechnical engineers we used as well as the relationship with our city building department.
This really strikes me as a product in search of a problem.
Maybe a homeowner could use this for initial planning before finding an architect to use, but at that point you're competing with pencil and paper.
- How much structural and geotechnical detail does an ADU need?by pbreit
- As counterpoint. I’m also building an ADU and no architect was needed. I had a drafter iterate on a layout document, most of it was deciding things like windows, door and cabinet layout. It’s not super necessary but informative to layout out MEPs (cost $800.) Although, we didn’t need colored or 3D renders, not value added for us.
From there, I kicked the PDF to a completely unrelated structural engineer that gave engineering specs, a few extra drawings that are standard copy pastes from his previous efforts, and his stamp (cost $600.)
From there, I had everything I needed to get accurate bids from general contractors and permits. Nobody needs to have any special city level connections in my major US city if you follow general code standards along the way they have to approve it. The GC knows what the on site inspectors will pass/fail as sometimes they play by different rules. At the end of the day, GC can always pull out the code book and prove an inspector wrong. Doing so tactfully is part of their jobs as inspectors are a revolving door and not always as knowledgeable as you’d think they should be.
Note. I don’t live in an area where seismic is an issue.
by conductr - The benefits were in communication and relationship arbitrage? Surely both of those can be automated over time.
This is just one aspect but it’s still useful. Many people want to see a house and say “please help me make that”. In Australia there’s a set of house patterns that reduce the overhead of just landing a design and pushing it through the admin hurdles.
by richardw - What happened to kit homes and plan books? Rather that bring down the cost of custom design, can we bring down the cost of partially pre-fabricated, modern code-compliant homes that still resemble something traditional (not a shipping container home)?
That said, I think this is neat because I’m buying a condo and knowing what’s even possible (physically, allowed by code, etc) seems more art than science. Getting answers usually involves bringing someone on-site, and almost nothing can be DIY’d anymore (either due to permits, HOA, complexity, etc)
by podlp - im currently building a home. one of the biggest issues is FAR which is very much driven by local laws. are you intending on addressing that at some point ?
looks great btw. congrats
by nibab - Thank you! After we get through building out the basic design tooling, we plan to get more into designing a specific plot of land and will look at adding zoning related contraints.by PrimalNick
- I just looked at the very first one featured on your website ("Sprawling Dark 5 Bed")[1]:
- A car parked in the garage perpendicular to the door and the other differently-sized car
- A bedroom missing a closet
- Attached bathrooms with multiple sinks
- An office with a weird entrance from a dead space from the garage
- External doors that open the wrong way (against fire code in most places)
- Closet doors opening inward
- Both doors of the top-left bathroom opens into the sinks (why two sinks?)
- The top-left bathroom has a weird dead space between the shower and bathtub (why both?)
- the random little floating feature in the middle of the open floorplan space doesn't make any structural or aesthetic sense
- The two bedrooms in the lower left with the weird bump-out for the windows that make no sense
- The window placement for many windows don't make sense and don't even line up with the 3D view of the house
- The hallway on the left that turns and goes to nowhere for no reason
- The additional random inaccessible dead spaces next to the bottom right bathroom
It took me just a few minutes to see this. I hope nobody ever builds a home based on these plans.
[1] https://cdn.drafted.ai/thumb/drafts/23025/generations/94729/...
Edited for formatting, to add a few points I missed, and to add a link to the image
by summermusic - Also they only support single-story homes but that image includes a staircaseby tadfisher
- This is a lot of fun.
https://cdn.drafted.ai/thumb/drafts/27019/generations/98723/...
- off-bathroom conference room!
- side-by-side toilets
- garage inaccessible except via bathroom
it's engrossing!
Also most (but not all!) of the designs seem to omit laundry facilities. I wonder whether there's a pattern there.
by stonogo - Dual vanities/basins (at least in an en suite) is not uncommon. (Edit: was looking at wrong bathroom - yes, very weird there.) Nor having separate bath and shower.
We had both in our last house which was a mid-range build and not overly expensive at the time (very cheap in hindsight).
Not commenting on the placements though. Looking at the floorplan, it’s a pretty silly layout that could at least be used as a starting point then tweaked, but at that point you might as well start with an off the shelf plan first. Reminds me of a procedurally generated dungeon game.
by prawn - I appreciate the feedback. They aren't perfect. The renders are just aethetic images that often rewrite the plan, the base plan that you can download doesn't include these. We are working on adding the generation for these objects directly into the base generation to fix these issues. They currently just serve as a way to get more context quickly so people can understand the floor plan better.
If you're someone looking for a schematic design level tool that can allow you to explore design for free then this will allow you to develop ideas and figure out a starting point to work off of.
We will continue to improve the model and build out more tooling for guiding it.
by PrimalNick - This is fun! I hadn't thought about how much possibility space there was in home layouts until now. Some layouts make a lot more sense than others.
I've thrown some weird setups at it like a high bedroom:bathroom ratio and it's doing a great job at distributing bathroom access between the bedrooms, and arranging the bedrooms around shared spaces.
Thanks for sharing.
by cgillett - Thank you for trying it out :)
There's an insanely big probability space and everyone has very unique desires/preferences when designing.
I'm really excited to see what people come up with.
by PrimalNick - I've looked at a few dozen of the designs featured on the front page, and most of them don't make sense. What is the purpose of this?by tralarpa
- Is a slop project from someone with the handle 'PrimalNick' a big surprise?by N_Lens
- In 2-3 days, we are pushing a change to the flow of the product to start on a project and orient more heavily towards designing with a purpose. That page will still exist, but as a place you go for inspiration or a starting point (we have remixing). It'll be nested in a sidebar where pinned inspiration is stored inside of a project and will autofilter based on what you're trying to do with your project to be more relevant.
Try creating a design and let me know how that goes!
by PrimalNick - There is probably more money in this as entertainment than architecture. And less liability.
How many of us have made house plans at some point?
by ____tom____ - There are a lot of people who dream scroll well in advance of buying or building, so we hope this can be a good place for productive exploration. I'm hoping people get inspired enough to want to go build.by PrimalNick
- Oooofff I want there to be some truth to this statement.
The SIMs ran my life for a while and today if there was a "build this plan into a real house" as a lead gen...
My gut says the crossover/cross-sale is just too hard and niche, but if it works, it sounds like one of those genius ideas.
by irjustin - I'll bite. I'm currently building a new home based on plans of my own design, literally taking a lunch break now from hanging electrical gangboxes.
Do you have a background in homebuilding? Or have you ever built anything before?
Visualizing the design is one thing, but the feasibility must be considered -- and often vetted through engineer(s) -- from the initial design phase. And even then, despite the best planning attempts, inevitably there will be some issues that need to be addressed 'on-the-ground' during construction.
I think you may be onto something, and I believe LLM models could be capable of accounting for e.g. code restrictions, structural considerations, MEP conflicts, etc. Most of the 'knowledge' homebuilders accumulate is trainable and repeatable. And- at least in the US- most of it has been codified/standardized in the IRC. But still there are tons of little caveats & gotchas to consider. Maybe those details could be addressed directly in your system prompts?
Also curious: what kind of "other files" does Drafted export "for the rest of the pre-construction process"? IDK to what extent you've used any existing home design software, but Home Designer/Chief Architect are capable of creating a (detailed) BOM for the entire build, down to every member of framing lumber. If the user chooses to enter price information, they can also provide cost estimates. A seemingly obvious AI-assisted improvement would be gathering price data automatically- say from the Lowe's or similar Big Box Hardware nearest to the user's location. And ideally keeping it updated as lumber & other materials fluctuate in cost.
To me a really capable AI design software could also be capable of: - Basic electrical load calculations - HVAC/ Schedule D [ductwork] design - Structural considerations- e.g., recommending a joist plan: type/size/direction/spacing of floor joists + validating against IRC and/or joist manufacturer load tables - and a whole lot more
I have a number of other ideas in case you're interested. Feel free to send an email (in profile).
PS- are you familiar with BIM software (like AutoDesk Revvit)? There a lot of 3D modeling capabilities you could borrow that go way beyond floor plans and aesthetic architectural considerations.
by hyperberry - I don't see your email in your bio, so I followed you on X to DM you.by PrimalNick