The work, decision by decision

Work on record

Table: The channel, week by week. Source: the engagement record.

The system: agentic architecture with Kanopi

Kanopi is the estimating and drafting system LÏEF built in 2026 to run its own work. It is the reason a partnership like this one can move at the speed of a production firm without guessing. It has two arms that feed one record, and every engagement runs under a human who signs the number. More on the Common Ground wiki and at kanopibuild.com.

The architecture arm. A team of drafting skills, each with one job (shell, modeling, drafting, envelope, structural, MEP, civil and landscape, coordination, quality review, jurisdictional code, and the bridge into the estimator), drives the Autodesk model through a programmatic control surface. On one of LÏEF's own projects the agents built the structural shell from the survey and the drawings and caught a bay that was nine and a half feet off against the field measurement.

The estimating arm. A staged pipeline takes a plan set from ingest to a rendered estimate:

1. Sheet ingest and revision diff. Every sheet is read, numbered and fingerprinted, so a new issue of the drawings shows exactly what changed.
2. Vector takeoff. Quantities are measured from the drawing's own geometry: wall runs, door leaves from their swing arcs, hatch bands, grid lines for the scale check. An overlay image is drawn and looked at before any number is trusted.
3. A blind second pass. An independent pass measures the same set without seeing the first. It is mandatory on every takeoff.
4. Cross-source checking. What was measured is checked against what the plans state and what a vendor quoted.
5. A sourced rate library. One versioned file. A rate counts only with a date and a source beside it, and a rate without them says so on the page.
6. Assembly. Lines roll up by CSI division with their provenance attached: measured, stated, quoted, or still an allowance.
7. Two audiences from one source. An owner copy and a partner copy come out of the same estimate, so the owner never sees partner language and the partner never sees owner terms.

The partner layer. This is what was built for the Builder Scaled channel. A partner price book holds Builder Scaled's card on its own track. Partner metrics load against the same lines as LÏEF's own rates, and the engine returns a match, review or conflict verdict line by line. The plans-only room and the bid portal are the two doors partners use: one for a wave of projects at once, one for the live pipeline.

What it does on a project. On the youth campus in the first wave, the engine re-measured interior scope that an earlier desktop estimate had carried at a density factor. The measured partition length came in at one fifth of the desktop figure, and the independent blind pass agreed. On the industrial shop the same week, reading the sheets directly showed the current issue was drawn as a different structural system than every prior estimate had assumed. Reading the drawings is the whole game.

How accurate it is. Kanopi publishes one accuracy figure, from a held-out test: 18.6 percent mean error across held-out bids, 31.9 percent on the worst. It comes with its ground truth and its corpus beside it, and it is the only one we cite. Kanopi is on an integration roadmap. We publish the result and keep the method to ourselves.

The hard problems

A price card is not a scope

A fixed design rate across eleven building types is a good market signal and a poor contract. It does not say how many revisions are included, whether civil and landscape are in, who handles resubmittals, or what happens when a plan reviewer kicks the set back. Kanopi carries the card as the market number and every project carries its own scope questions beside it, so nobody confuses the two.

Selling capability before stating the deal

The overview described two arms, a pipeline and a body of work, and the first question back was whether contractors would license the software. The answer was no, and the document should have said so on page one. The rule now applies to everything a partner reads: the deal in one sentence, first.

A national pitch on a local record

Builder Scaled sells national coverage. LÏEF's record is deepest in Arizona and runs through a dozen states. The partnership treats that honestly: national reach comes from Builder Scaled's licensed network and LÏEF's ability to place contracts in a new market, and each new state is entered the way LÏEF enters any market, with a measured takeoff and a budget before anyone spends money on drawings.

How the two firms fit together

Common Ground runs the engagement: the go-to-market strategy, the leads and the relationships with owners, developers, architects, engineers and contractors. It is where Builder Scaled's growth question was asked and answered.

LÏEF Builders is the construction arm the partnership runs through. It offers pre-construction, general construction and owner representation across the country. Builder Scaled's drawings are the production inside a project LÏEF has already priced and will help place.

Kanopi is the estimating architecture both sides work through: one takeoff, one set of quantities, Builder Scaled's price book on its own track, and the bid portal as the door.

Builder Scaled produces and seals the drawings and brings its general contractors, including the contractor group it is building nationally.

The line between them is simple. Common Ground and LÏEF hold the owner relationships and the pricing. Builder Scaled holds the production and the seals. Contractors compete on one set of quantities. Each side brings work to the other.

Methods that did the work

• Seal diligence. Who seals, where, under which registration, and who carries the liability, before any introduction.
• One project at a time. Every project earns the next.
• One set of quantities. Every contractor prices the same measured takeoff, so differences are real differences.
• A blind second pass on every takeoff, and an overlay that is looked at before a number is trusted.
• A rate needs a source. A rate without a date and a source is marked on the page.
• Allowlist every partner view. A partner sees the fields named for it and nothing else.
• State the deal first. One sentence, before any capability.

What is live today

• The LÏEF GC Bid Portal. Password-protected, at bids.liefbuilders.com. Builder Scaled has its own login. Open projects show plans and takeoffs; bids and pricing open per project, per viewer, on Jesse's grant. The pipeline counts show partners there is more than they can open.
• Builder Scaled's price book in Kanopi. The full card, architecture, MEP and structural across eleven building types, on its own track, with match, review and conflict verdicts against every partner number that comes back.
• The plans-only project room. The first five projects, each with a synopsis, a takeoff with assumptions and open questions, and the drawings.
• Routed projects. Residential additions in Queen Creek and Scottsdale, a six-unit multifamily building in Phoenix, a restaurant shell in Avondale, an industrial shop in Mesa, a youth campus in Phoenix, the second building of an office-to-residential conversion in Phoenix, and a detached garage in Mesa.
• LÏEF Builders' national offering. Pre-construction, general construction and owner representation across the country.
• Kanopi. On an integration roadmap at kanopibuild.com, with a Common Ground data room and a page on the Common Ground wiki.

Where this goes next

Builder Scaled's contractor group is already bidding a Phoenix building as the contractor. The next step is to give that group a standing place on every LÏEF project that fits it. A contractor who prices one set of quantities every few weeks gets faster and sharper each round, and his numbers tighten the price book with every bid.

What it produced

A working channel in six weeks. Eight projects have routed to Builder Scaled through the portal, the first contractor proposal came back the morning after the package went out, and Builder Scaled's own general contractor group is bidding a commercial building in Phoenix as the contractor. Every contractor in the channel now bids one set of measured quantities, and every partner number is checked line by line against both firms' rates before an owner sees it.

Builder Scaled is the first time Common Ground ran its go-to-market and relationship work for a production firm and then built the construction channel behind it. Jesse uses the same system every week on LÏEF's own bids: one takeoff, one set of quantities, a blind second pass, and a portal where contractors see what is open.

A slice of the project list

A few related projects.

• Kanopi: the estimating architecture behind the channel, one takeoff and one set of quantities for every contractor (2026 to present)
• LÏEF Builders: pre-construction, general construction and owner representation across the country, the construction arm the partnership runs through
• LÏEF GC Bid Portal: the password-protected door where partner contractors see what is open to bid (live since September 2026)
• Tellus Design + Build: the design and build firm Jesse ran as chief executive from 2004 to 2022, where the first in-house estimating system was built