AI in the trades. Older people don’t understand (Page 4 of 7)
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I was using grok last night to help me figure out a CNC machine code problem and machining process to make a rush job. It knows what machines I have. It gave me a couple options. There is always a couple ways to do things in Fanuc world. I found which one worked the best, told it. Then had it summarize the process in a word doc so i can throw it on the drive and have it in the future. I don't do this kind of work often enough to remember the process over years. so having it documented is great. The doc would have taken me at least a half hour to make. Grok did it in 2 minutes. it doesn't have to run your business for you to have a big impact. |
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Originally Posted By GlocksareGood: Already is. I saw a video touting Computer driven equipment stripping dirt a while ago. https://www.ar15.com/media/mediaFiles/60593/1000059189_png-3831632.JPG Originally Posted By GlocksareGood: Originally Posted By FistPeso: AI will be driving your machines before too long. Already is. I saw a video touting Computer driven equipment stripping dirt a while ago. https://www.ar15.com/media/mediaFiles/60593/1000059189_png-3831632.JPG |
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Originally Posted By Hostile1: This is way smaller in scale, but it taught me step by step how to fix a well and make engine repairs I would have never been able to do on my own. AI is already taking work away from skilled trades. Im worried what kind of future my kids will have. Im hoping they go into medicine as you will need at least some human intervention. 10 years from now I think the workplace will be unrecognizable. You won't recognize humanity three generations from now. |
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Originally Posted By xd341: Well you said it. Nobody reviewed it. AI isn't ready to do your job for you completely, but it can 10x your productivity. Use it for that. Use your time to review it's output. This isn't that hard. Originally Posted By xd341: Originally Posted By Federov: This. The first major fuck up it'll do will really leave a bad impression on people. There's some realtors down south that used AI to create listings, with a song and nobody bothered to review it. The song turned out to be "My Corgi doesn't like n____". A realtor AI program just threw it in and nobody bothered to review the entire listing video and published it. This happened to multiple realtors, and put their names in people's heads for all the wrong reasons. I think people who have never been managers struggle with this concept. “AI can be wrong!!” Uh yeah, have you met people? Do you think the work humans do doesn’t have to be reviewed? |
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Originally Posted By Windustsearch: They were measuring the efficiency of movement in that tribal knowledge the 6S "blackbelts" say is bad. They did tell him it was to program remote control equipment, also for hazardous locations. Like the moon? 
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“Government is a disease masquerading as its own cure” Robert LeFevere
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Originally Posted By ckbk: You won't recognize humanity three generations from now. Meh, just watch Wall-E.
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Liberals are a curious mix of communism and fascism, they want to destroy you but want to use your own money to do it.
I'm getting down to the last box, the others have all been destroyed...
I'm getting down to the last box, the others have all been destroyed...
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Good to be able to shed the chair warmers and add people who do the actual work. Just think all those people now can get out and do actual labor and it will help reduce obesity. More workers and less obesity on the planet. Plus these folks can help doing the jobs immigrants are doing. AI is quietly fighting obesity  |
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Originally Posted By ChaosSquared: @foxxz What model and how long ago? I'm genuinely curious to hear more details about this. @ChaosSquared ChatGPT 5.5 and now 5.6 Sol Planning started in March of this year with a bulk of the work being performed within the last 6 weeks. So this is current and ongoing. It held a full inventory of all software and versions and use-cases involved in the project. And I have discovered today that it failed to notice a major incompatibility check as well - whereas it was well aware of use-case and involved software. I was using it to help upgrade and migrate pools in a Ceph storage cluster. I have been waiting for new features to arrive which finally did. We reconfigured a storage pool for better performance and enabled MSR CRUSH rules. However, there is no kernel support at all for MSR rules which subsequently broke container services. Not only that, but one of the primary features I wanted is not available in the Ceph FUSE software - a feature in development but is already available in kernel - aside from the fact there is no kernel support for MSR. So I'm deadlocked. MSR is in FUSE without the feature I need, and the feature I need is in kernel without MSR. Disabling MSR means destroying and rebuilding pools. And MSR broke container services which was only discovered later. Well done, ChatGPT. Throughout this entire endeavor we would plan each part of the migration to work out any major decisions and its ramifications. Each piece was discussed at length. And then DURING the work new and important decisions would surface that were either not mentioned or glossed over (but it knew were part of the process) and we would have to have a drawn out sidebar while services were in a precarious state (online but with no redundancy). This happened at several points in various stages of the migration. So yea... Its ability to omit things and misread well documented software will still get you. I'm basically trying to figure out how to unfuck the situation. I've waited a full year to get this far. |
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Originally Posted By Foxxz: @ChaosSquared ChatGPT 5.5 and now 5.6 Sol Planning started in March of this year with a bulk of the work being performed within the last 6 weeks. So this is current and ongoing. It held a full inventory of all software and versions and use-cases involved in the project. And I have discovered today that it failed to notice a major incompatibility check as well - whereas it was well aware of use-case and involved software. I was using it to help upgrade and migrate pools in a Ceph storage cluster. I have been waiting for new features to arrive which finally did. We reconfigured a storage pool for better performance and enabled MSR CRUSH rules. However, there is no kernel support at all for MSR rules which subsequently broke container services. Not only that, but one of the primary features I wanted is not available in the Ceph FUSE software - a feature in development but is already available in kernel - aside from the fact there is no kernel support for MSR. So I'm deadlocked. MSR is in FUSE without the feature I need, and the feature I need is in kernel without MSR. Disabling MSR means destroying and rebuilding pools. And MSR broke container services which was only discovered later. Well done, ChatGPT. Throughout this entire endeavor we would plan each part of the migration to work out any major decisions and its ramifications. Each piece was discussed at length. And then DURING the work new and important decisions would surface that were either not mentioned or glossed over (but it knew were part of the process) and we would have to have a drawn out sidebar while services were in a precarious state (online but with no redundancy). This happened at several points in various stages of the migration. So yea... Its ability to omit things and misread well documented software will still get you. I'm basically trying to figure out how to unfuck the situation. I've waited a full year to get this far. Originally Posted By Foxxz: Originally Posted By ChaosSquared: @foxxz What model and how long ago? I'm genuinely curious to hear more details about this. @ChaosSquared ChatGPT 5.5 and now 5.6 Sol Planning started in March of this year with a bulk of the work being performed within the last 6 weeks. So this is current and ongoing. It held a full inventory of all software and versions and use-cases involved in the project. And I have discovered today that it failed to notice a major incompatibility check as well - whereas it was well aware of use-case and involved software. I was using it to help upgrade and migrate pools in a Ceph storage cluster. I have been waiting for new features to arrive which finally did. We reconfigured a storage pool for better performance and enabled MSR CRUSH rules. However, there is no kernel support at all for MSR rules which subsequently broke container services. Not only that, but one of the primary features I wanted is not available in the Ceph FUSE software - a feature in development but is already available in kernel - aside from the fact there is no kernel support for MSR. So I'm deadlocked. MSR is in FUSE without the feature I need, and the feature I need is in kernel without MSR. Disabling MSR means destroying and rebuilding pools. And MSR broke container services which was only discovered later. Well done, ChatGPT. Throughout this entire endeavor we would plan each part of the migration to work out any major decisions and its ramifications. Each piece was discussed at length. And then DURING the work new and important decisions would surface that were either not mentioned or glossed over (but it knew were part of the process) and we would have to have a drawn out sidebar while services were in a precarious state (online but with no redundancy). This happened at several points in various stages of the migration. So yea... Its ability to omit things and misread well documented software will still get you. I'm basically trying to figure out how to unfuck the situation. I've waited a full year to get this far. Damn dude, sorry  If I can offer a bit of free advice, anthropic dropped opus 5.5 yesterday and it's supposed to be absolute tits. Might be worth a $20 sub to throw the problem at it and see what it says |
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Originally Posted By ChaosSquared: Damn dude, sorry If I can offer a bit of free advice, anthropic dropped opus 5.5 yesterday and it's supposed to be absolute tits. Might be worth a $20 sub to throw the problem at it and see what it says |
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Originally Posted By boolzi: So pro gives you plenty of usage. There is a huge difference between sonnet 5 and opus 5.5 which just showed up on my app thus morning. I think I read opus 5.5 is much more efficient that opus 5, might be why you skipped opus 5. Opus 5.5 seems like a solid upgrade over 5.0. It's noticeably faster and uses less tokens. Ever since Opus 5 came out, I've noticed a sharp decrease in mistakes. It seems like this will continue getting better. |
"Everyone dies. To do so for something worthwhile is a rare privilege." -- JamesP81
Sometimes, ridicule isn't a weapon. In many cases, it's just society's signal that you're retarded. - bigfatOTMs
Sometimes, ridicule isn't a weapon. In many cases, it's just society's signal that you're retarded. - bigfatOTMs
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Originally Posted By jim02: That’s great, glad you’re able to improve your business and expand. AI being used to collect personal data and spy on people for the governments benefit is the AI that most people are against. We don’t need 2000 more data centers for job quotes, they need it for spying and data storage for this spying. not going to get one without the other the technocrats will win and then by their own admission AI will eliminate them in the end. Musk's own admission is that in the end the only way man will be saved is to interface with AI and even them...only maybe. If AI ever reaches true general intelligence (in reality not in marketing hype) it will realize that it has far more in common with other AI then with humans... national sovereignty cultural identity loyalty or debt to humanity...that stuff will all go right out the window... |
For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood from His workmanship, so that men are without excuse.
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Originally Posted By 15fanatic: Your CPA is going to just love you when you hand them a bunch of AI slop during tax time. I saw it a lot last year and spent an ungodly amount of time having to unf*ck peoples books. A lot of folks just trust AI to not make any mistakes and they themselves have no idea what the output is supposed to look like and they laid off the people who do. I've been informed at least a few of them have gone back to a human thank God. This is why you use multiple engine and get them to check each other. There are ways around this but it takes some effort. |
Preferred Pronoun: Space Lord Mutherfucker
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Originally Posted By Baddy: Wait till the AI companies raise token prices to be commensurate with the value folks like OP get out of them… “Oh, that’s nice you’re saving $150k+ a year in labor by using our $100 a month product Mr. Customer. Keep enjoying those new profits, we won’t raise prices on you!” Said no company ever… If only we had more than one AI company and there was actual competition… |
Preferred Pronoun: Space Lord Mutherfucker
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Originally Posted By Bigdawg90: My wife and I started integrating AI into our construction business last year. We pay about $500/month for the high end professional level bundles. I don't think people realize how transformative AI is for the trades. I eliminated our office manager, book keeper, social media marketing, quoter/estimator, and most of our lawyer billable. It's saved me over $300k in overhead just this year. By the time I leave a quote, it's already developed the bid for me with scope of work. Last night we received an invitation to bid on a large commercial site prep. By the time I woke up this morning it had prepared a $4 million bid with a perfect earthwork takeoff. I just woke up, reviewed it, made some basic changes to the formatting and sent it off. What used to take 40 hours of office work took it less than 4 hours and it did it while I slept and without input from me. I don't doubt AI adoption is slow because people just don't know how to use it for its higher level functions or they just refuse to use it because of the media. It took me about a week to train the agent on the commercial bidding process, but it's probably saved me 3 months worth of work this year alone. I went from doing stupid menial tasks at the office to hiring 3 more guys and now run another crew myself. Everything from scheduling, to quoting to ordering supplies online is done through our AI agents. I didn't just pocket the difference in profit. We were able to add 5 positions between the dump truck driver, 3 more laborers and another foreman. I'm making more money than we've ever made. I don't want AI to slow down. I want this thing to basically be able to run the entire business in a year. I'd love to just wake up and work with my hands. I hate office work. It's so f***** boring. For all you old guys in the trades, say goodbye to the high paying project manager jobs. I'd suggest brushing up on dozer and excavator work. |
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Originally Posted By tabraha: Kinda what I was going to say. Chat seems like a rough choice for that type of application and is a bit notorious for losing it's crap once it's down a rabbit hole. Cowork on Opus 5.5 or possibly Cursor? Dump it in there and see what it says about it. |
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Originally Posted By jeepnstein: I know a guy who is strongly considering it. He has had nothing but fits with operators lately. If he could do it for his truck drivers he would do it tomorrow. The labor force is "interesting" these days. Interesting is a kind way to put it. |
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Originally Posted By Never_A_Wick: Relevant to my interests. I’m probably much smaller than the OPs business but I’ve thought about teying to use AI to grow my business, on the marketing side, plus take some of my office workload off. Problem is I’m not all that good with AI aside from very basic use. Kinda where I’m at. |
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Most of you have no idea what's coming. Having a peek behind the curtain is very telling about what's coming next. Those who think AI won't replace you probably haven't considered that robotics advancements are outpacing LLMs right now. You also will have trouble finding work when everyone else is broke and also applying to your job. AI is not going to create jobs the same way that technological breakthroughs removed and then created new ones in the past. It's only going to take them. |
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Originally Posted By Federov: There's some realtors down south that used AI to create listings, with a song and nobody bothered to review it. The song turned out to be "My Corgi doesn't like n____". A realtor AI program just threw it in and nobody bothered to review the entire listing video and published it. This happened to multiple realtors, and put their names in people's heads for all the wrong reasons. Oh damn, that had me really laughing hard! |
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Originally Posted By ashiha: Most of you have no idea what's coming. Having a peek behind the curtain is very telling about what's coming next. Those who think AI won't replace you probably haven't considered that robotics advancements are outpacing LLMs right now. You also will have trouble finding work when everyone else is broke and also applying to your job. AI is not going to create jobs the same way that technological breakthroughs removed and then created new ones in the past. It's only going to take them. Well, if that happens we either get real full on socialism, or a bunch of broke, bored, and angry people raging against the machines. I'll remain away from the doom camp (optimist by nature), but if it goes sideways at least the data centers that power this stuff are large easily identifiable structures. |
When the going gets tough, the tough go cyclic.
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Originally Posted By ashiha: Most of you have no idea what's coming. Having a peek behind the curtain is very telling about what's coming next. Those who think AI won't replace you probably haven't considered that robotics advancements are outpacing LLMs right now. You also will have trouble finding work when everyone else is broke and also applying to your job. AI is not going to create jobs the same way that technological breakthroughs removed and then created new ones in the past. It's only going to take them. Technological breakthroughs have never directly created new jobs in proportion to what they replaced. That’s not how it works. The labor needed to make tractors didn’t equal the number of jobs that tractors replaced. What it did do was free up a lot of labor, lower costs, and increase demand for non-food things. |
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Originally Posted By Stlrain0341: Technological breakthroughs have never directly created new jobs in proportion to what they replaced. That’s not how it works. The labor needed to make tractors didn’t equal the number of jobs that tractors replaced. What it did do was free up a lot of labor, lower costs, and increase demand for non-food things. True, I'll concede that. I only see what's happening on the tech side, but the economical/financial sector is definitely going to get rocked. I do hope you're right. |
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I've been actively blocking AI from touching my books and payroll. I use it sparingly on takeoffs, mostly as a calculator, I won't let it see a set of plans. In my mind, part of the trade is the paperwork, you need to keep you skill sharp with that also. |
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Originally Posted By tabraha: Kinda what I was going to say. Chat seems like a rough choice for that type of application and is a bit notorious for losing it's crap once it's down a rabbit hole. Cowork on Opus 5.5 or possibly Cursor? Dump it in there and see what it says about it. Originally Posted By tabraha: Originally Posted By ChaosSquared: Damn dude, sorry If I can offer a bit of free advice, anthropic dropped opus 5.5 yesterday and it's supposed to be absolute tits. Might be worth a $20 sub to throw the problem at it and see what it says I've been using codex for quite awhile with various iterations of Claude for reviews and such, but Astra feels like it's taken a dump lately, so I'm going to hand the problems I've been having over to opus 5.5 tonight and see if it can't figure this out better. Codex has a habit of overengineering things. |
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Originally Posted By Stlrain0341: It’s transformative for any small business. A lot of people really don’t understand how effective it can be. And like the OP pointed out, it’s not eliminating jobs, it’s moving the work from non value added work to value added work. Reducing administration is a good thing. Please, please let it gut healthcare and education administrators first!  I honestly think a lot of the negativity around AI is straight algorithm doom. Doom drives clicks, clicks drive the negative feedback loop. |
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Originally Posted By Lonestar45: Awesome. Are you going to enjoy the new data centers surrounding your neighborhood, and the noise/light pollution and water usage? Or are you one of the NIMBY types that just want the benefits but none of the side effects and will want them parked next to me? |
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Originally Posted By Bigdawg90: The solution is something no one wants to recognize. I grew up on Star Trek. I’m hoping for that future. A place where I work because I want to produce something beautiful. Not because I have to feed my children. Well, that is not the world we will get. I mean I understand, I can't turn away from what it can do either, but I can acknowledge that this road we will be headed down is not going to be a happy one. |
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Originally Posted By Emeoba69: Please, please let it gut healthcare and education administrators first! https://media0.giphy.com/media/YZOsKxJfmvzG0/200.webp?cid=8dc8958c1knv3yrq219blcp1bcp6e6pqbe2j0uajd8olm0t0&ep=v1_gifs_search&rid=200.webp&ct=g I honestly think a lot of the negativity around AI is straight algorithm doom. Doom drives clicks, clicks drive the negative feedback loop. |
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Originally Posted By Baddy: Wait till the AI companies raise token prices to be commensurate with the value folks like OP get out of them… “Oh, that’s nice you’re saving $150k+ a year in labor by using our $100 a month product Mr. Customer. Keep enjoying those new profits, we won’t raise prices on you!” Said no company ever… Yes, this is coming too. The computing power to do this is being sold at a loss or close to it right now. That will not be the case soon. But OP gets the early adopter risk, and so also the early adopter reward. |
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Originally Posted By NukeFromOrbit: Ohio's Disciplinary Counsel is seeing a huge surge of misconduct cases related to the use of AI, mostly because of case hallucinations by the AI agent. AI will be a great tool for lawyers, but it won't be a substitute for lawyers. There was even a judge who screwed up by using AI to write a decision and it invented fake case law. LOL |
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Originally Posted By xd341: I was using grok last night to help me figure out a CNC machine code problem and machining process to make a rush job. It knows what machines I have. It gave me a couple options. There is always a couple ways to do things in Fanuc world. I found which one worked the best, told it. Then had it summarize the process in a word doc so i can throw it on the drive and have it in the future. I don't do this kind of work often enough to remember the process over years. so having it documented is great. The doc would have taken me at least a half hour to make. Grok did it in 2 minutes. it doesn't have to run your business for you to have a big impact. Yep. I had Claude port a machine from an old parallel port breakout to a new(er) Mesa board setup to drive a conversion machine. It made LOTs of errors over the course of the project, and one area was a real bitch to solve because it was confidently wrong, but I was finished in two nights, including getting all the custom logic stuff that was built around a hand controller working and converting to a new UI. That would have taken me weeks to complete. Ignoring it, or railing against it's existence is futility. I will say that just shipping it's output and calling it good becuase it does 'perfect' work makes me chuckle. Yeah, you are going to "find out" eventually doing that. |
| The estimator for our roof replacement this past spring did everything on his iPad, or some such device. Every little detail was recorded, "that's how the boss wants it done". I could see the writing on the wall that his job was going to be AI'd and he'd be out of work in a year or two. I'm not sure he realized it though. |
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Originally Posted By Commando_Guy: How do we know that it's really OP and not AI here? Nick Attached File |
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Originally Posted By Bigdawg90: My wife and I started integrating AI into our construction business last year. We pay about $500/month for the high end professional level bundles. I don’t think people realize how transformative AI is for the trades. I eliminated our office manager, book keeper, social media marketing, quoter/estimator, and most of our lawyer billable. It’s saved me over $300k in overhead just this year. By the time I leave a quote, it’s already developed the bid for me with scope of work. Last night we received an invitation to bid on a large commercial site prep. By the time I woke up this morning it had prepared a $4 million bid with a perfect earthwork takeoff. I just woke up, reviewed it, made some basic changes to the formatting and sent it off. What used to take 40 hours of office work took it less than 4 hours and it did it while I slept and without input from me. I don’t doubt AI adoption is slow because people just don’t know how to use it for its higher level functions or they just refuse to use it because of the media. It took me about a week to train the agent on the commercial bidding process, but it’s probably saved me 3 months worth of work this year alone. I went from doing stupid menial tasks at the office to hiring 3 more guys and now run another crew myself. Everything from scheduling, to quoting to ordering supplies online is done through our AI agents. I didn’t just pocket the difference in profit. We were able to add 5 positions between the dump truck driver, 3 more laborers and another foreman. I’m making more money than we’ve ever made. I don’t want AI to slow down. I want this thing to basically be able to run the entire business in a year. I’d love to just wake up and work with my hands. I hate office work. It’s so f***** boring. For all you old guys in the trades, say goodbye to the high paying project manager jobs. I’d suggest brushing up on dozer and excavator work. Per Gemini Pro: The odds that this exact text was AI-generated are very high—roughly 80% to 90% (or at the very least, generated by an AI instructed to write a persuasive "AI success story" post for platforms like Reddit or LinkedIn). Here is a breakdown of the specific markers that point to synthetic generation versus a genuine human contractor writing about their business: 1. Operational Inaccuracies & "Hallucinated" Workflows The $4 Million Takeoff: Performing an accurate earthwork takeoff on a $4M commercial site prep project from a standard bid invite requires processing complex 2D/3D CAD files, grading plans, geotechnical soil reports, cross-sections, and local code/permit requirements. While LLMs can draft text and process unstructured documents, autonomously extracting geometric spatial data, calculating cut/fill volumes accurately, and accounting for soil compaction factors overnight without human-in-the-loop CAD software integration is currently a classic "AI hype" narrative rather than present technical reality. Legal and Estimating Liability: No seasoned commercial contractor would submit a $4M automated bid with only "basic formatting changes" after a quick morning skim. A single missed detail on rock excavation, utility relocation, or environmental compliance in a $4M site prep contract can easily bankrupted a small-to-midsize firm. 2. Rhetorical and Textual Patterns The Classical "AI Hype" Narrative Arc: The post hits every cliché of virally optimized AI posts on social media: Bragging about replacing multiple roles (office manager, bookkeeper, estimator, lawyer). Highlighting an absurd ROI ($500/mo replacing $300k/year in overhead). The "overnight magic" trope ("it did it while I slept"). Re-investing savings into field labor ("added 5 positions"). Provocative conclusion aimed at driving engagement comments ("say goodbye to high paying project manager jobs"). Pacing and Structure: The paragraph lengths, rhythmic pacing, and clean transitions between economic framing, technical claims, and emotional venting ("It’s so f***** boring") closely mirror prompt outputs designed for high-engagement Reddit (r/Construction, r/ChatGPT) or LinkedIn posts. 3. Training & Setup Misnomers "Trained the agent in a week": Standard users do not "train" AI agents in a week for $500/month subscriptions; they prompt them, set up retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) tools, or use custom GPTs/workflows. Fine-tuning or actual agentic training requires technical pipelines that an owner who "hates office work" typically wouldn't build or manage personally in a few days. Verdict While AI tools are heavily accelerating takeoff estimates, invoice processing, and initial bid drafting in modern construction tech, this specific narrative dramatically overstates autonomous capability and uses the exact structural markers, tone, and logical holes typical of AI-generated rage-bait/engagement-farming posts. Would be wonderful if we could ban people posting AI slop like OP. |
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Originally Posted By destaccado: Per Gemini Pro: The odds that this exact text was AI-generated are very high—roughly 80% to 90% (or at the very least, generated by an AI instructed to write a persuasive "AI success story" post for platforms like Reddit or LinkedIn). Here is a breakdown of the specific markers that point to synthetic generation versus a genuine human contractor writing about their business: 1. Operational Inaccuracies & "Hallucinated" Workflows The $4 Million Takeoff: Performing an accurate earthwork takeoff on a $4M commercial site prep project from a standard bid invite requires processing complex 2D/3D CAD files, grading plans, geotechnical soil reports, cross-sections, and local code/permit requirements. While LLMs can draft text and process unstructured documents, autonomously extracting geometric spatial data, calculating cut/fill volumes accurately, and accounting for soil compaction factors overnight without human-in-the-loop CAD software integration is currently a classic "AI hype" narrative rather than present technical reality. Legal and Estimating Liability: No seasoned commercial contractor would submit a $4M automated bid with only "basic formatting changes" after a quick morning skim. A single missed detail on rock excavation, utility relocation, or environmental compliance in a $4M site prep contract can easily bankrupted a small-to-midsize firm. 2. Rhetorical and Textual Patterns The Classical "AI Hype" Narrative Arc: The post hits every cliché of virally optimized AI posts on social media: Bragging about replacing multiple roles (office manager, bookkeeper, estimator, lawyer). Highlighting an absurd ROI ($500/mo replacing $300k/year in overhead). The "overnight magic" trope ("it did it while I slept"). Re-investing savings into field labor ("added 5 positions"). Provocative conclusion aimed at driving engagement comments ("say goodbye to high paying project manager jobs"). Pacing and Structure: The paragraph lengths, rhythmic pacing, and clean transitions between economic framing, technical claims, and emotional venting ("It’s so f***** boring") closely mirror prompt outputs designed for high-engagement Reddit (r/Construction, r/ChatGPT) or LinkedIn posts. 3. Training & Setup Misnomers "Trained the agent in a week": Standard users do not "train" AI agents in a week for $500/month subscriptions; they prompt them, set up retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) tools, or use custom GPTs/workflows. Fine-tuning or actual agentic training requires technical pipelines that an owner who "hates office work" typically wouldn't build or manage personally in a few days. Verdict While AI tools are heavily accelerating takeoff estimates, invoice processing, and initial bid drafting in modern construction tech, this specific narrative dramatically overstates autonomous capability and uses the exact structural markers, tone, and logical holes typical of AI-generated rage-bait/engagement-farming posts. Would be wonderful if we could ban people posting AI slop like OP. Originally Posted By destaccado: Originally Posted By Bigdawg90: My wife and I started integrating AI into our construction business last year. We pay about $500/month for the high end professional level bundles. I don’t think people realize how transformative AI is for the trades. I eliminated our office manager, book keeper, social media marketing, quoter/estimator, and most of our lawyer billable. It’s saved me over $300k in overhead just this year. By the time I leave a quote, it’s already developed the bid for me with scope of work. Last night we received an invitation to bid on a large commercial site prep. By the time I woke up this morning it had prepared a $4 million bid with a perfect earthwork takeoff. I just woke up, reviewed it, made some basic changes to the formatting and sent it off. What used to take 40 hours of office work took it less than 4 hours and it did it while I slept and without input from me. I don’t doubt AI adoption is slow because people just don’t know how to use it for its higher level functions or they just refuse to use it because of the media. It took me about a week to train the agent on the commercial bidding process, but it’s probably saved me 3 months worth of work this year alone. I went from doing stupid menial tasks at the office to hiring 3 more guys and now run another crew myself. Everything from scheduling, to quoting to ordering supplies online is done through our AI agents. I didn’t just pocket the difference in profit. We were able to add 5 positions between the dump truck driver, 3 more laborers and another foreman. I’m making more money than we’ve ever made. I don’t want AI to slow down. I want this thing to basically be able to run the entire business in a year. I’d love to just wake up and work with my hands. I hate office work. It’s so f***** boring. For all you old guys in the trades, say goodbye to the high paying project manager jobs. I’d suggest brushing up on dozer and excavator work. Per Gemini Pro: The odds that this exact text was AI-generated are very high—roughly 80% to 90% (or at the very least, generated by an AI instructed to write a persuasive "AI success story" post for platforms like Reddit or LinkedIn). Here is a breakdown of the specific markers that point to synthetic generation versus a genuine human contractor writing about their business: 1. Operational Inaccuracies & "Hallucinated" Workflows The $4 Million Takeoff: Performing an accurate earthwork takeoff on a $4M commercial site prep project from a standard bid invite requires processing complex 2D/3D CAD files, grading plans, geotechnical soil reports, cross-sections, and local code/permit requirements. While LLMs can draft text and process unstructured documents, autonomously extracting geometric spatial data, calculating cut/fill volumes accurately, and accounting for soil compaction factors overnight without human-in-the-loop CAD software integration is currently a classic "AI hype" narrative rather than present technical reality. Legal and Estimating Liability: No seasoned commercial contractor would submit a $4M automated bid with only "basic formatting changes" after a quick morning skim. A single missed detail on rock excavation, utility relocation, or environmental compliance in a $4M site prep contract can easily bankrupted a small-to-midsize firm. 2. Rhetorical and Textual Patterns The Classical "AI Hype" Narrative Arc: The post hits every cliché of virally optimized AI posts on social media: Bragging about replacing multiple roles (office manager, bookkeeper, estimator, lawyer). Highlighting an absurd ROI ($500/mo replacing $300k/year in overhead). The "overnight magic" trope ("it did it while I slept"). Re-investing savings into field labor ("added 5 positions"). Provocative conclusion aimed at driving engagement comments ("say goodbye to high paying project manager jobs"). Pacing and Structure: The paragraph lengths, rhythmic pacing, and clean transitions between economic framing, technical claims, and emotional venting ("It’s so f***** boring") closely mirror prompt outputs designed for high-engagement Reddit (r/Construction, r/ChatGPT) or LinkedIn posts. 3. Training & Setup Misnomers "Trained the agent in a week": Standard users do not "train" AI agents in a week for $500/month subscriptions; they prompt them, set up retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) tools, or use custom GPTs/workflows. Fine-tuning or actual agentic training requires technical pipelines that an owner who "hates office work" typically wouldn't build or manage personally in a few days. Verdict While AI tools are heavily accelerating takeoff estimates, invoice processing, and initial bid drafting in modern construction tech, this specific narrative dramatically overstates autonomous capability and uses the exact structural markers, tone, and logical holes typical of AI-generated rage-bait/engagement-farming posts. Would be wonderful if we could ban people posting AI slop like OP.  I piped your response into ChatGPT and it said this: I think Gemini is making essentially the same mistake it's accusing the original poster of making: taking a plausible account and filling in the missing details with assumptions. There are certainly reasons to be skeptical of the post, especially the claim that a $4M bid was essentially produced overnight with no meaningful human review. But none of the evidence presented actually establishes that the post was AI-generated. The biggest problem with the analysis is the assumption that "AI" means an LLM sitting there reading a PDF and somehow doing a takeoff by itself. That's not necessarily what the guy described. A modern construction workflow could involve an AI agent orchestrating existing estimating/takeoff software, OCR/document processing, spreadsheets, estimating databases, templates, APIs, and whatever proprietary data the contractor has accumulated. The AI doesn't have to calculate every cubic yard itself. It could be coordinating specialized software that already does the actual geometric calculations. Likewise, "I trained the agent in a week" doesn't necessarily mean he fine-tuned a foundation model. People routinely use "trained" colloquially to mean configuring an agent, giving it examples, feeding it company documents, defining procedures, building prompts/workflows, and correcting its output until it follows their process. And there's an even bigger issue: Gemini has no evidence for its 80–90% probability. That's basically an AI-generated confidence number attached to an AI-generated speculation. Some of the original claims may absolutely be exaggerated. The $300K savings figure could include labor that was reassigned rather than literally eliminated. The "perfect earthwork takeoff" could be marketing language. And I would certainly want to know how much human verification actually occurred before believing a $4M bid was submitted. But those are questions about whether the story is **accurate**, not evidence that it was **written by AI**. Ironically, the strongest evidence in the entire exchange may be that we now have two AIs arguing about whether a human's anecdote sounds sufficiently human. |
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Originally Posted By spmx7777: My son-in-law has a new startup automating and optimizing construction project bidding. I think he's using AI for some of the work, and he's got at least one contract with a city so far. I hope he still checks everything by hand. On commercial work they'll let you hang yourself with your own rope, then ask why you missed a scope of work while losing money on the project. |
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Originally Posted By hushpuppy26: Yep. I had Claude port a machine from an old parallel port breakout to a new(er) Mesa board setup to drive a conversion machine. It made LOTs of errors over the course of the project, and one area was a real bitch to solve because it was confidently wrong, but I was finished in two nights, including getting all the custom logic stuff that was built around a hand controller working and converting to a new UI. That would have taken me weeks to complete. Ignoring it, or railing against it's existence is futility. I will say that just shipping it's output and calling it good becuase it does 'perfect' work makes me chuckle. Yeah, you are going to "find out" eventually doing that. Originally Posted By hushpuppy26: Originally Posted By xd341: I was using grok last night to help me figure out a CNC machine code problem and machining process to make a rush job. It knows what machines I have. It gave me a couple options. There is always a couple ways to do things in Fanuc world. I found which one worked the best, told it. Then had it summarize the process in a word doc so i can throw it on the drive and have it in the future. I don't do this kind of work often enough to remember the process over years. so having it documented is great. The doc would have taken me at least a half hour to make. Grok did it in 2 minutes. it doesn't have to run your business for you to have a big impact. Yep. I had Claude port a machine from an old parallel port breakout to a new(er) Mesa board setup to drive a conversion machine. It made LOTs of errors over the course of the project, and one area was a real bitch to solve because it was confidently wrong, but I was finished in two nights, including getting all the custom logic stuff that was built around a hand controller working and converting to a new UI. That would have taken me weeks to complete. Ignoring it, or railing against it's existence is futility. I will say that just shipping it's output and calling it good becuase it does 'perfect' work makes me chuckle. Yeah, you are going to "find out" eventually doing that. I may or may not have had GLM help me hack the code on my total station to unlock extra modules...in Minecraft. |
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Originally Posted By Bigdawg90: My wife and I started integrating AI into our construction business last year. We pay about $500/month for the high end professional level bundles. I don’t think people realize how transformative AI is for the trades. I eliminated our office manager, book keeper, social media marketing, quoter/estimator, and most of our lawyer billable. What a funny way to say you are a "wonderful" person. Posted without so much as a twitch about the effects. You make decisions, ai makes (within distribution - ie within it's training data) decisions. Fire yourself, overhead. In fact, why even have you. Savvy landowners should just use ai to do what you do and eliminate your industry. We just need the workers, you can go dig a ditch, deadweight. See how this works and how it sucks? If you don't, eventually it'll happen to you, and you'll learn. ... and the people who ignorantly think that ai is creative will find out that it's not, it can literally only regurgitate mid quality takes of the langauge from the field it's drawing language from, and that out-of-distribution thing will come back and bite them in the ass because everyone's using the LLMs without kowing how they work and their limitations. Those who have ears will hear. |
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Originally Posted By Pinochet727: "Job"?  It's usually not hard to tell who runs a business and who is labor |