A senior engineer’s afternoon goes to checking a junior’s calcs line by line. A graduate’s week goes to spot-the-difference between shop drawings and design drawings. Most of it is mechanical — misreads, unit slips, values that don’t carry through, schedules that drift from the markup.
Datum does the mechanical layer in minutes. Your engineer keeps the judgment — and the signature.
The language model only extracts — it never produces a number. A deterministic engine recomputes every value; an independent second implementation recomputes again; disagreement gets flagged, not smoothed over. Clause citations come from a versioned registry, so a hallucinated reference is structurally impossible.
Datum returns a deterministic flag list: what is wrong, exactly where, which clause, and the recomputed value. No confidence percentages. No black box. Your engineer dispositions each flag. Your engineer signs.
Line-by-line recompute of the calc package: arithmetic, units, value propagation, partial factors and clause usage to EC2/EC3 with UK National Annexes.
Reads the structured regions of drawings — sizes, grades, callouts, schedules — and reconciles every value against the calculations that justify it.
Bar bending schedules against rebar markup: bar count, type, dimensions, radius, anchorage and lap lengths — the drift where real errors hide.
Element-by-element comparison of manufacturer shop drawings against approved design drawings. Every divergence listed with both source locations.
Connection details verified against the design: bolt sizes and locations, weld sizes and types, end plates, grades — sheet by sheet, joint by joint.
Traces loads floor by floor to the foundations and recomputes the takedown independently — flagging every level where the package disagrees with itself: the errors that surface in the ground-floor columns.
Output: flag list · comment sheet · provenance-complete check record · golden-thread ready
Bring us a finished package where your own engineers raised comments. We show you which of those comments the machine reproduces — and which it misses. You score us against your own red pen.
Pilots run on superseded, closed projects only, under NDA: marked-up check prints, comment registers, calculations, drawings, schedules and revisions. No live projects until the machine has earned it on closed work.
Datum does not check whether the design is right — whether the approach was sound, the scheme sensible, the engineering judgment good. That stays with the engineer, and so does the signature.
The machine never computes a design decision and never approves anything for construction. It checks what the package claims; whether the claims are wise stays with the engineer.
Every Datum check builds a source-traceable project graph. Span (in development) will use it to assemble the mechanical majority of design work — proposed by machine, decided by a named engineer, and always checked by an independent party before issue. Thread (roadmap) will carry the assembly work around the project — submissions, comment responses, change tracing, Gateway completeness — on the same graph. Assembly automated; opinion never.
Datum is the product today. The rest is where the architecture goes.
EC2 · EC3 · UK National Annexes · IStructE categories · BS 5975