PermitZIP

Mechanical and electrical engineers designing exclusively for small projects.

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[PermitZIP @PermitZIP]

The robots find the data; the engineers use the data.

[Kenny Shultz @PermitZIPhvac]

Two weeks ago, we were dinosaurs. Now our projects are AI-integrated.

The tech leap is unreal.

Don't miss out on what AI can do for your business right now.

@PermitZIP @PermitZIPelec @PermitZIPplumb

[PermitZIP @PermitZIP]

Come see how we use agents to do real life MEP engineering work.

[Kenny Shultz @PermitZIPhvac]

Cracked Engineering Live is officially on. Dec 8, 2 PM ET.

I will be opening up our engineering harness at @PermitZIP and showing AI agents doing real MEP/HVAC work, live. Nick Heim will help cohost and field questions.

Plus a first look at Mutiny BIM.

Limited call-in spots, so bring your questions and join us on stage.

Register: https://t.co/YEtFI4C0jU

[PermitZIP @PermitZIP]

We plan to give the power of design to our clients.

Why wait for your engineer when you can use your agent to sketch out your vision?

Our licensed engineers will review and integrate the final product for a stamped deliverable.

Everyone wins.

[Kenny Shultz @PermitZIPhvac]

A zero shot proof of concept for a browser based collaborative BIM software

Users see updates in realtime. And the sheet updates in realtime.

It's an extremely simplified proof of concept so we can run performance testing on different technical stacks.

(Opus 5.5)

[PermitZIP @PermitZIP]

Looking forward to our audit @autodesk 🩷💅🥰

[Kenny Shultz @PermitZIPhvac]

This is a wild approach, @autodesk.

We’re a small business paying $380 per user, per month. We’ve been paying customers for over a decade, and we make a deliberate effort to honor the license agreements for every product we use. Your software already requires authentication and an assigned license. What, specifically, prompted this email?

Earlier today, I had two conversations on two separate podcast episodes about your direction with Fusion and why cloud-based API access makes sense for agentic MEP workflows. I was making the case for Autodesk. I think the product direction is right based on recent posts from @andrew_anagnost.

Our company has been deciding where to invest our development effort: integrate our custom cloud agent harness into Autodesk, build on an open-source platform, or adopt one of the emerging cloud alternatives. That decision will lock in years of internal development and software spending. This decision is also central to our plans to expand @PermitZIP nationwide.

An email like this becomes part of that decision. So does the time we have to spend responding to it.For more than a decade, we’ve paid for anywhere from 5 to 30 licenses each year. Autodesk is our single largest SaaS expense. This is a heck of a way to make our next platform decision easier.

Starting next week, we’ll begin transitioning away from Autodesk products. We have nothing to hide and will cooperate with the audit. We’ll also be directing our future spending toward companies that earn our confidence as partners.

I hope your audit goes well.

[Kenny Shultz @PermitZIPhvac]

For the first time in my engineering business, I can see a practical path to growing revenue without growing headcount at the same pace.

These are early, actual numbers from @PermitZIP. Human-directed agents account for 39% of the revenue in this snapshot and 9% of the combined people-and-agent costs. We’re already billing agent work to projects, with a multiplier on the money we spend running them.

The human drives the work. They scope it, direct the agents, challenge the answers, and take responsibility for the result. But that person can have multiple agents working across multiple projects at the same time.

That changes the relationship between a human hour and the amount of billable work it can support. Combined human-and-agent billable hours can exceed the human hours available. Traditional utilization only captures part of what’s happening.

The percentages here describe our revenue and cost mix. Human supervision costs sit on the people side. These are early results, with plenty of systems still to build.

But this is exactly why we’re preparing for a major scaling move at PermitZIP. We see a huge, underserved market in small projects, where the cost of delivering engineering has limited what people could afford to ask us to do.

We’re finally seeing a way to serve more of that market while growing the amount of work each person can drive. That has enormous implications for A/E and other service businesses.

[PermitZIP @PermitZIP]

@PermitZIPhvac @typesafeai ask jeeves? no. ask jev? yes plz

[Kenny Shultz @PermitZIPhvac]

Quick JEV explainer for people in construction who aren't computer scientists.

JEV (by @typesafeai) isn't an LLM. It's a small, fast model that answers structured questions about data: yes/no, a score, or a pick from a list.

You give it a meeting transcript and ask "Was electrical scope discussed?" and it just tells you.

At @PermitZIP, we've given an "ask_jev" tool to our agent harness. Instead of the LLM reading billions of tokens of project data (hundreds of dollars to do so), the agent writes the questions and lets JEV do the reading.

JEV is fast and cheap enough to feel practically free next to frontier-model token costs.

The video walks through a real example on our own meeting transcripts.

I realize this sounds sponsored, but it's not. You can tell I don't really know much about the technical part of this because I only learned how to pronounce "noul" today....AFTER this video. 🫥

[PermitZIP @PermitZIP]

Survey day in Richmond, VA. Existing church building adding some classrooms. Let us know if you need help with MEP engineering drawings!

[Carter Huddleston @PermitZIPelec]

Most electrical issues don’t start in the panel.

They start with what you don’t notice in the field.

In this episode of Field Notes, we’re on site in D.C., walking a multi-unit building and documenting what’s actually there.

🔻 150A single-phase load centers in each unit
🔻 SER cable leaving the building
🔻 Limited wall space for a meter stack
🔻 Mostly three-wire… but one four-wire plus ground

Small differences matter.

Three-wire vs four-wire changes how you think about the service.
Meter layout changes what’s feasible.
Field verification changes everything.

If you work in MEP, you already know that existing conditions tell the real story.

Take a look at the latest Field Notes episode and see what we found.

#ElectricalEngineering #MEPEngineering #CommercialConstruction #ArchitectureAndDesign #MEP #SiteVisit

[Carter Huddleston @PermitZIPelec]

Here are some of the things an electrical engineer is looking for when they are on a site visit. This is from a recent @PermitZIP site survey in Virginia Beach.

[PermitZIP @PermitZIP]

@bethanyjbabcock We want all the detailed progress photos 😀

[PermitZIP @PermitZIP]

New phone, who 'dis?

[Kenny Shultz @PermitZIPhvac]

New branding is up.

Let us know what you think!

https://t.co/oh8PedsbWl

[Kenny Shultz @PermitZIPhvac]

Imagine building part of your company around an AI platform, paying for access, following the rules, and planning future products around it.

Then one day, your account is shut down.

That happened to us at @PermitZIP.

We appealed and provided additional context. @AnthropicAI denied the appeal and called the decision final, but never identified the specific activity or policy violation that triggered the ban.

The timing overlapped with @openclaw going viral, so our best guess is that an automated system misclassified something we were doing. Maybe it thought we were violating the terms through a third-party tool. Maybe it thought our small MEP engineering company was a Chinese lab attempting to distill its models.

We still do not know.

We are engineers building practical AI tools for the architecture, engineering, and construction industry. We were paying customers operating in good faith (even paying for extra usage), and access to the platform disappeared without a meaningful explanation or a path to correct the problem.

I share this story whenever someone talks about building an entire company on top of one AI provider.

Design for portability. Keep control of your data. Build fallbacks before you need them. Assume any vendor can become a single point of failure, even when you have done nothing wrong.

[PermitZIP @PermitZIP]

Unpopular opinion: exposed ductwork isn’t that bad.

Don’t burn the HVAC budget trying to hide ductwork and equipment if that money could be spent on features that actually protect the building: dehumidification, equipment staging, etc

A pretty ceiling is nice. A building that stays comfortable, dry, and mold-free is better.

[Kenny Shultz @PermitZIPhvac]

@AnthropicAI has been acting a little precious lately.

A couple months ago, they permanently banned our account at @PermitZIP because they probably thought we were China trying to distill their models. Who knows.

They didn't tell us.

And we have logs of every conversation from CoWork. We found zero TOS violations. And we were paying for extra usage.

We were just a small MEP engineering firm building internal tools.

Anyway, @cursor_ai is going to eat them up. Composer 2.5 is handling about 90% of our feature requests now. And @OpenAI GPT-5.5 handles pretty much everything else.

Long story short: we are no longer giving Anthropic $12k a month in extra usage.

Also, it is pretty funny watching Anthropic get so offended about model distillation after paying $1.5B to settle a lawsuit over training on copyrighted human work.

[PermitZIP @PermitZIP]

You can take hundreds of pictures on a site visit, until you get back to the office and realize you didn't take a picture of that one area you need to look at.

Here is @PermitZIPhvac on a recent PermitZIP site survey with our 360 camera. Helps us capture every angle.

Need help with MEP engineering for your next project? Let us know how we can help!

[PermitZIP @PermitZIP]

Ever wondered what an electrical single line diagram looks like in real life?

Check out this example from a recent PermitZIP project in Norfolk, Virginia. We have a tap box where the electric utility (Dominion Energy) will terminate their conductors. From there, the conductors land on two main breaker meter stacks, that provide power and metering for the multifamily apartment units.

Awesome coordinated work like this is only possible with a great team backing the MEP engineering design!

Owner: Tim Foley
Architect: GARC LLC
General Contractor: Ringenberg Construction, LLC
MEP Engineer: PermitZIP

[PermitZIP @PermitZIP]

Some site photos from a PermitZIP project in Newport News, VA for a multifamily renovation. 🏗️

It’s always great when some demolition has already been completed and we get a chance to see the inner workings of the building systems.

So much of what we do is hidden behind walls and above ceilings. That’s why we love partnering with trade contractors early in the design process: getting their input, collaborating on the best path forward, and creating designs that are safe, code-compliant, and cost-effective.

Looking for help on your next MEP engineering project? Let us know how we can help! 👷‍♂️

[PermitZIP @PermitZIP]

Our team on site for a recent survey in Short Pump, VA. This is a tenant improvement project: a former restaurant converting to a retail store.

Life is a lot easier when everything at a building is clearly labeled, like this RTU was for this project.

Need help with MEP engineering drawings for your next project? Give us a shout!

[PermitZIP @PermitZIP]

Recent survey for an upcoming PermitZIP project. Existing electrical meter stack for a multifamily project. Most important things to check is the main breaker size and the size of the breaker feeding each unit.

Need help with MEP engineering for your project? Let us know how we can help!

[PermitZIP @PermitZIP]

Grabbing lunch at one of our completed projects, Wood & Iron! Great food (and an even better MEP system). It's always great to see the projects we design on paper come to life. #PermitZIP #MEPengineering