A little over a week ago I asked an AI assistant to rate my blog. My lousy blog. bongkersz.com. Yes. This blog lah! The one that I killed, abandoned for almost 10 years and then somehow decided to resurrect again because that’s what midlife crisis looks like? Maybe.

So, last night, the same AI was checking concrete volumes, reinforcement, wall areas, floor finishes and electrical fittings for 17 buildings, against their actual drawings. How the hell did we go from “Eh, rate my blog” to “Check whether this RAB actually matches the drawing” in slightly more than one week?

Cautiously lah of course. I did not trust it right away.

At first I deliberately gave it jobs where screwing up didn’t matter. Like harmless stupid things – describe my Twitter account, then my friends’ accounts. The usual personality read thing from your tweets. Rate my blog. Fix this photo. Colour that old photo. Small things. If it hallucinated something stupid, nobody dies and no contractor gets paid for concrete that doesn’t exist HAHAHAHA!

Then I gave it something more important: my master spreadsheet. Monitoring sheets. For contracts, CAPEX, projects, progress, quantities and all the usual reporting rubbish that accumulates over the years. That session ran the whole day. Build this tracker. Reconcile these files. Change this. No, not like that. Apply the same correction everywhere else.

What started winning me over was not the speed. It was the fact that when it could not verify something, it said so instead of inventing a number. Ah. That I can work with. And then things escalated. Damn!

Once all this plumbing exists, naturally you start throwing more things at it. It now checks my inbox and tells me what actually needs attention. It reads my FCPO charts and gives me the levels I am monitoring without trying to be some guru shouting BUY BUY BUY!!!. I also gave it some of my old tender evaluation reports and asked it to draft new ones using the same structure.

The funny part is the AI assistant is on my WhatsApp, so for most of the past week I have basically been walking around staring at my phone and furiously WhatsApping it instructions. To everybody else it probably looks like I have spent one whole week chatting nonsense on WhatsApp. In reality, quite a lot of the work above was happening there.

Still needs checking. Still needs judgement. But a half-finished report is much nicer than a blank Microsoft Word page.

Then came this stupid idea. Or brilliant idea. Still deciding. What if…. I see if this thing can do this instead.

You see, I am currently preparing tenders involving 17 buildings, and every RAB has to match the construction drawings. Oh RAB – Rencana Anggaran Biaya. Bill of Quantities for those who are not familiar.

Every year end or start of the year I need to prepare for new tenders. Anyone who has done the quantity take-off knows how boring and tedious this becomes: measure, calculate, check drawing, check specification, wonder where this quantity came from, why this mistake or that detail and specification I thought I already rectified before is still there?? And then you start questioning your life choices.

So it is a perfect job for an AI guinea pig. Mana tau if it can help to cut down the time and repetitive work, kan? No harm trying.

I started with one small fertilizer store and taught it how I wanted the quantities measured. Show the calculation. Reference the drawing. Don’t assume blank means zero. Flag anything that doesn’t make sense. Basically, remember mathematics in school? Show your working! How you get that? No no your assumptions are wrong. Ah you can just calculate it this way. Then it started finding things for me! Silly typos. Lazy detailing. All kinds of shit. Embarrassed man to be corrected by an…… AI.

One drawing showed 5 mm of sand underneath a floor slab. Five millimetres. Obviously something wasn’t right. Most likely it should have been 50 mm, but the interesting part was that it stopped and flagged it instead of happily calculating whatever the drawing said.

Then another one. The RAB allowed for 2 wall fans. The drawing showed 8. Hmmmm. Somebody is going to have either a very windy room or a very hot one. HAHA!

Of course it gets things wrong too. On the first pass it called those fans ceiling fans. I checked the drawing. No lah. Wall fans. Corrected it, it corrected the workbook and continued. That is basically how I’m using it now. AI calculates, AI checks, AI highlights discrepancies, AI shows me the evidence. I decide. No. The 17 buildings RAB work is not done. I need to go through one by one with many lists and comments from my new assistant. 😭😭

So what is it actually? Can replace my job or not? It is many things and yet not everything. (Does that even make sense LOL). Not a Quantity Surveyor. Not an engineer. Not the person signing anything. The closest description is probably a very enthusiastic junior who doesn’t get tired of measuring things, shows his calculation, occasionally talks cock and waits for me to tell him whether he is right. Does not get tired.

That is genuinely useful. It does the repetitive work, compares files, recalculates quantities and brings strange things back to me. The boring 80%. I deal with the irritating 20%.

And no, it isn’t always fast either.

One of my print/report runs took around one hour and forty minutes. I was busy working on other things, then when I came back, eh, still working? At one point I actually asked, “Done?” Then later, I quipped “That is quite long.” HAHAHAHA!

Nothing. No hurt feelings. No black face from the employee because the boss complained. It just continued doing its bloody work. Beautiful.

A little over one week ago I was asking it to rate my blog. Then spreadsheets. Reports. Emails. FCPO charts. And eventually: here are the drawings and RAB for seventeen buildings. Check the quantities.

WTF.

I think the order matters. I gave it stupid jobs first, checked the answers, found mistakes, corrected them, and slowly increased the consequences of getting things wrong. I still check everything. The difference now is I know much better where it is useful, where it is stupid, and where I still need to keep my own hands on the steering wheel.

No magic. Just another tool. A surprisingly useful one. Can use lah!