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Industry news, product innovations, and strategies for adopting new technologies in design and manufacturing.

Decide, Don't Generate: Inside Aginera's Decision Engine for AI in Construction and Design Automation
Engineering10 min read

Decide, Don't Generate: Inside Aginera's Decision Engine for AI in Construction and Design Automation

Decision models like Jev made a simple idea popular: some AI should return a typed decision with a probability, not a paragraph. We had been building exactly that for construction. Here's how Aginera's decision engine turns estimator judgment into bounded questions, where it sits in the takeoff and design pipeline, and what it measures on customers it has never seen.

Kiran Karunakaran
Oct 6, 2026
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Decide, Don't Generate: Inside Aginera's Decision Engine for AI in Construction and Design Automation
Engineering10 min read

Decide, Don't Generate: Inside Aginera's Decision Engine for AI in Construction and Design Automation

Decision models like Jev made a simple idea popular: some AI should return a typed decision with a probability, not a paragraph. We had been building exactly that for construction. Here's how Aginera's decision engine turns estimator judgment into bounded questions, where it sits in the takeoff and design pipeline, and what it measures on customers it has never seen.

Kiran Karunakaran
Oct 6, 2026
Plumbing Takeoff From PDF Plans: What a 38-Sheet Multifamily Set Actually Yields
Estimating8 min read

Plumbing Takeoff From PDF Plans: What a 38-Sheet Multifamily Set Actually Yields

Most plumbing takeoff guides are generic. This one walks a real 38-sheet multifamily set — underground DWV, water, risers, isometrics and schedules — and shows what each sheet type actually contributes: 461 traced runs, roughly 5,500 LF of pipe, and the mistakes that put wrong numbers in the estimate.

Kiran Karunakaran
Sep 21, 2026
Data Center Estimating: Cutting MEP Takeoff Time on Hyperscale and Colocation Builds
Industry7 min read

Data Center Estimating: Cutting MEP Takeoff Time on Hyperscale and Colocation Builds

A data center bid is not a big office bid. It is an electrical and mechanical set with hundreds of sheets, a schedule on almost every one of them, and an addendum every week. Here is where the estimating hours actually go, and what AI takeoff changes.

Kiran Karunakaran
Sep 19, 2026
LEED Certification and AI Takeoff: Getting the Material Quantities Right the First Time
Industry7 min read

LEED Certification and AI Takeoff: Getting the Material Quantities Right the First Time

Most LEED materials credits are quantity problems before they are sustainability problems: how many products, how much mass, from which sheets. Here is how an AI takeoff produces that quantity set, what it feeds, and what it does not do.

Kiran Karunakaran
Sep 19, 2026
Integrating Aginera into Your App, Claude, or Copilot
Engineering7 min read

Integrating Aginera into Your App, Claude, or Copilot

Aginera exposes the same takeoff engine two ways: a REST API for your backend and a remote MCP server for agents like Claude, ChatGPT and Copilot. Here's how to authenticate, upload a drawing, run a takeoff, and pull structured quantities — with copy-paste code for each path.

Kiran Karunakaran
Sep 3, 2026
Takeoff AI That Remembers: How Aginera's Extraction Memory Makes Every Takeoff Better Than the Last
Engineering11 min read

Takeoff AI That Remembers: How Aginera's Extraction Memory Makes Every Takeoff Better Than the Last

Single-pass AI takeoff forgets everything between documents. We gave our extraction pipeline three kinds of memory — semantic, episodic, and procedural — with a verification layer that makes every learned fact provable. Here's the architecture, the guardrails, and the measured results.

Kiran Karunakaran
Aug 26, 2026
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“DesignOps is pioneering by offering AI to our customers. This makes advanced engineering insights accessible without any additional cost.”
Kiran Karunakaran
Founder, Aginera