Notes from building ConGro AI — engineering deep-dives, product updates, and changelog entries.

• Apr 28, 20264 min readProduct

  ConGro AI is live

  After ten months of building, ConGro AI is publicly available at congro.ai. The first natural-language assistant purpose-built for structural engineers — starting with CSI ETABS, with the rest of the structural software toolchain rolling out next.

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• Apr 15, 20265 min readProduct

  Why I built ConGro AI

  A structural engineer's answer to the question every engineer asks at 2 AM: "There has to be a faster way to do this."

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• Mar 20, 20262 min readChangelog

  ConGroAI v0.2 Beta — Nearing Completion

  Major improvements and upgrades are on the way. The end-user product is close to ready, with a number of new tools landing in the next release. Natural-language automation for ETABS, almost shippable.

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• Mar 3, 20265 min readProduct

  Introducing ConGro AI v0.1 — the World's First Functioning AI Agent for Structural Engineering

  After eight months and a Long Video Compressed File of build footage, the project finally has a name. ConGro AI v0.1 is the first ConGro-branded version of the structural-engineering AI agent — built on lessons from the SAP 2000 MCP prototype, the CSIChat experiment, and a custom framework that replaces all of it.

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• Sep 4, 20256 min readResearch

  v0.8 — A Custom MCP Client and Server, and a 5-Tower Demo

  Two months in, the prototype no longer needs Claude Desktop. v0.8 ships a custom MCP client running directly against the Claude API, paired with a custom MCP server. The demo: five towers, 30–80 floors each, cable-stayed sky bridges. 42,429 elements. Under 10 minutes versus 30+ hours of manual modeling.

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• Aug 8, 20255 min readResearch

  CSI-AI v0.7 Beta — End-to-End: From Model to Results in One Conversation

  A milestone for the prototype: the entire structural workflow — model creation, materials, loads, analysis, results — now runs end-to-end from a single chat window. Both SAP 2000 and ETABS supported. Plus a tease of what comes next: Civil Core Brain and Civil Core Agent.

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• Aug 20254 min readEngineering

  SAP 2000 MCP Server v0.4 — By the Numbers

  A few weeks in, the SAP 2000 MCP server is at v0.4 — 700+ Python files, 140,000+ lines of code, 1,900+ wrapped OAPI functions. Here is what it took to get there, and the trade-off behind that 20–40% size overhead.

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• Jul 28, 20255 min readResearch

  Introducing CSIChat v0.1 — Putting the LLM Inside the Engineering Software

  The MCP-server-on-the-outside experiment was working. But the next version had to live inside the platform — not next to it. CSIChat v0.1 is the prototype for that idea: an LLM with API-documentation retrieval (BM25s — several times faster than traditional RAG), baked directly into SAP 2000 and ETABS.

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• Jul 19, 20256 min readResearch

  SAP 2000 v0.3 — Materials, Sections, and Loads

  Eleven days after the first end-to-end build, the prototype is at four of nine phases: A992 steel, 4 ksi concrete, W14 sections, and DEAD/LIVE loads — all driven from natural language. And one limitation that hints at the architecture having to change.

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• Jul 8, 20257 min readResearch

  Building the First AI Integration for SAP 2000

  The first post in a series. The prototype is an MCP server bolted onto SAP 2000. Here is what it took to make a language model drive a structural analysis package — 2,000 OAPI methods, two LLMs, and one obstinate idea.

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