Callout
100%
Our Mission
Process any DOT plan into machine-readable outputs.
Plan View
by Estimators Apprentice
Designed by contractors, for contractors.
Read a DOT plan set in
minutes, not weeks.
Estimator's Apprentice pairs a frontier reasoning model with our own vision-language model trained on millions of DOT and heavy-civil plan sheets, so each does what it does best. We're not just giving good instructions to someone else's model — we're researching how to solve AI's context problem in our field, building software that combines classical computer vision with modern machine learning so the system actually understands heavy-civil plans. The reasoning model handles the logic and calls our own domain-adapted tools — purpose-built for heavy-civil plans, not off-the-shelf plugins: searching your plans, proposals, addenda and specs, reading extracted tables, and following the evidence across the whole set — then hands off to our custom VLM when a question needs the drawing itself understood. Connected through MCP, they turn a whole DOT project into answers: every callout found and organized, plan quantities pulled straight into Excel, and every spec, manual, and plan from all 50 states one question away.
- Plans, proposals, addenda & specs in one project
- Automatic page classification & project organization
- Plan quantities & tables → Excel in seconds
- Callout & detail discovery across the whole set
- Hybrid engine: a frontier reasoning model for logic & tools, a plan-trained VLM for drawings, linked by MCP
We are currently in the demo phase. To try out the application, reach out to me at z.morton@estimatorsapprentice.com.