Reviewing drawings

A drawing review reads a sheet set, checks it against itself and against any standard you give it, and returns a findings table and an annotated PDF with callouts that open in Bluebeam. Ask for it in a conversation. No workflow or firm standard is required to start; both improve it.

Who asks for one changes what they look for, and the procedure stays the same. A design team runs it before an issue. A contractor runs it on a bid set or an issued-for-construction set to find what will become an RFI. An engineer runs it across disciplines to catch conflicts with the architectural set.

Watch a drawing review from survey to annotated PDF. More on the Recordings page.

Four steps​

From Drawing Reviews:

1. Survey. The Nomic agent reads the set: sheet index, disciplines, sheet counts, what is present and missing.
2. Scope. It proposes a review type and issue classes and waits for confirmation. Steer here.
3. Review. Checklists per discipline, a sub-agent per issue class, each finding verified by the drawing judge before it is recorded.
4. Results. The Drawing Review artifact: findings table beside marked-up sheets.

Built-in checklists cover architectural, structural, mechanical, plumbing, electrical, civil, fire protection, telecommunications, and landscape, plus cross-discipline checks. Findings derived from adopted code come from Code Compliance and need Codes Search enabled. Code Compliance has its own section in the next lesson.

Review type and effort​

Two settings, two different levers. From Review types:

• Review type is coverage.
  • Light: the most common issues, sampled. Five to ten sheets between milestones.
  • Thorough: the full checklist for the disciplines in scope.
  • Comprehensive: every discipline, every issue class. A milestone review.
• Effort is reasoning depth: how long the agent thinks and how many tools it may call before deciding.

Light with Low for an everyday check. Thorough with Low or Medium for a weekly coordination pass. Comprehensive with Extra High (for example Sonnet 5.5 Extra High) for a 90% set, a permit set, or a bid set. Cost is about $0.50 per sheet across types; the total depends on how many sheets and how much reasoning.

Comprehensive at Extra High: the agent states the cost and waits. Confirm the sheet count is what you meant before saying yes.

Light review of the ten sheets I attached. Only flag what a contractor would raise as an RFI.

Comprehensive review of the full 90% set in the project files, every discipline. Extra High effort. Confirm the sheet count and estimated cost before starting.

The findings table​

From Drawing Review details:

Column	What it is
Drawing citation	Sheet and location. Click to land on the callout.
Title / Summary	The issue, in a sentence or two.
Standard citation	The section of the firm standard the finding is based on, if any.
Code citation	The retrieved code excerpt, for code-derived findings.
Status	New, Accepted, Exported, Addressed, Ignored.
Severity	Per the checklist.
Discipline	Which sub-agent found it.

Sort by severity, filter by discipline, open the citations. A finding whose drawing citation lands where it says, and whose standard or code citation (when it has one) says what the summary claims, is one to act on. A finding with no citation that opens is one to investigate first.

Follow-ups​

The review is a conversation. Steer without re-running:

• "Only show what a contractor would raise as an RFI."
• "Go deeper on the door and finish schedules."
• "Drop the cosmetic findings and re-sort by severity."
• "Add the Level 2 mechanical sheets I just attached."

Follow-ups reuse the context the review built, so they cost less than starting over.

Getting findings out​

Findings move New → Accepted → Exported → Addressed or Ignored. Reopen returns an addressed finding to Accepted and an ignored one to New. Accept what you agree with, then:

• Download the annotated PDF with Export. Findings and callouts are standard PDF markups. They behave natively in Bluebeam Revu, PDF-XChange, and Acrobat.
• Export the table to Excel or JSON.
• Push to the delivery tool. Autodesk Forma: Create Issue or Create RFI per finding. Fieldwire: Create Task or Create RFI. Both act on Accepted or Exported findings only.

Common failure: Comprehensive without checking the count​

The project's Files page holds three sets (the 60%, the 90%, and last phase's record drawings) and the prompt says "the set." The agent reads all three. The pause before an Extra High run is where to catch it: if the sheet count is triple what you expected, the scope is wrong.

The opposite failure is a Light review on a permit set and being surprised by what it did not catch. Light is a spot check. Match the type to the milestone.

Next: reviewing a submittal, answering an RFI, and when a question turns on adopted code.

Next: Submittals, RFIs, and codes