Architecture, Engineering and Construction
Inherited from core
Question- A decision is unknown and blocks progress. May resolve with no agent work at all.
Plus the 21 shared cues in the core vocabulary, which every profile inherits.
Call types specific to this domain
Clash- Two systems want the same physical space.
Routing- Whether something fits, and what path it takes to get there.
Load- A capacity question — electrical, cooling, ventilation, structural, or water.
Code- An adopted code, jurisdiction, listing, or approval question.
Price- A cost or value-engineering comparison.
Build- A constructability, sequencing, or means-and-methods question.
RFI- A formal response is owed to another party.
Product- Manufacturer or equipment data evaluated against the actual design constraints.
Dialect
acknowledge“Heard”“Listening”Standard in coordination rooms. Recorded from real owner-architect-contractor sessions, not chosen for style.
already_owned“Already mine”“Already running”Reflects that the agent study is already under way, which is the usual reason a task is re-raised.
Approval
The design professional in responsible charge who will seal the drawing or calculation the result affects.
The owner still closes the task and states the disposition. Approval is an additional gate on reliance, recorded before the result leaves the room as a finding.
Where a jurisdiction or licensing board designates responsible charge for the work, that person approves and this profile cannot designate anyone else. An agent result is a study input, never a sealed document.
Additional states
sign_offWhere the closed result will be incorporated into a document bearing a professional seal, the professional in responsible charge records approval in the project record, separately from the verbal close in the session.
Worked examples
An owner-architect-contractor meeting. A prospective restaurant tenant intends to install a solid-fuel smoker, and the question is whether the existing kitchen shaft can carry the additional exhaust.
The same kind of coordination meeting, run the way most rooms already run. Nothing here looks like a failure while it is happening — which is the point.
Who this is for
Design charrettes, coordination meetings, and owner-architect-contractor sessions where several disciplines study questions against a shared model or drawing set.
These meetings already run on an implicit protocol — an agenda, logs, a round table, polling by name. What they generally lack is a way to close anything in the room. A coordination question gets discussed thoroughly, lands on "it depends," and leaves as a request for information. Under this Standard it leaves as a claimed task with a named owner and a stated disposition.
Call types
| Say | When |
|---|---|
| Clash | Two systems want the same physical space. |
| Routing | Whether something fits, and what path it takes. |
| Load | A capacity question — electrical, cooling, ventilation, structural, water. |
| Code | An adopted code, jurisdiction, listing, or approval question. |
| Price | A cost or value-engineering comparison. |
| Build | Constructability, sequencing, or means and methods. |
| RFI | A formal response is owed to another party. |
| Product | Manufacturer data evaluated against the actual design constraints. |
Load is deliberately broad across disciplines rather than reserved for structural loading, because in a coordination meeting the word is used that way in practice.
Ownership
| Task | Owner |
|---|---|
| Clash, Routing | The discipline whose system has to move |
| Load | The engineer responsible for that system |
| Code | Any design professional on the affected discipline |
| Price | Estimator or contractor |
| Build | Contractor |
| RFI | Project manager, with the responsible discipline reviewing |
| Product | The specifying engineer — never a manufacturer's representative |
Approval
This profile requires approval. The Owner closes their own task, as in every domain — but in this one, a closed result cannot be relied upon until the professional in responsible charge has approved it.
Approver: the design professional in responsible charge who will seal the drawing or calculation the result affects.
Where a jurisdiction or licensing board designates responsible charge for the work, that person approves and this profile cannot designate anyone else. That is licensure law, not a rule this Standard invented.
An agent result is a study input. It is never a sealed document, and it does not become one by being approved. Approval under this Standard establishes that a qualified person has reviewed the study and decided what may be relied on. Sealing remains governed entirely by the applicable licensure law.
Additional required state: Sign-off
This profile adds one REQUIRED state after CLOSE:
sign_off— Where the closed result will be incorporated into a document bearing a professional seal, the professional in responsible charge records approval in the project record, separately from the verbal close in the session.
The verbal close ends the loop in the room. The recorded sign-off is what survives into the project file.
Worked examples
Worked examples for this profile are published as data in examples/transcripts/, so the dialogue exists in exactly one place and the repository validator checks that every spoken cue still matches the vocabulary this profile declares.
- Does the kitchen shaft still work? — a real coordination meeting. A prospective restaurant tenant wants a solid-fuel smoker; the task ends Parked with a named blocker rather than Accepted, which is the interesting part.
- Nobody was listening when the constraint was given — the same kind of meeting run the way most rooms already run it. Three invariants break in under a minute, none of them noticeably, and a wrong answer reaches a tenant.
They render at co-prompting.com/examples.
Vocabulary
The shared vocabulary — Hold, Clarify, Mine, Prompting, Add, In, Preliminary, Out of scope, Parked, Pass, and the rest — lives in the core specification, Section 7. It is the same in every domain, and several of those cues are MUST-level because they carry an invariant rather than a convention.
Dialect
This profile substitutes two phrases, both recorded from real coordination meetings rather than chosen for style:
| Cue | Core default | This profile says |
|---|---|---|
acknowledge | "Heard" | "Listening" |
already_owned | "Already mine" | "Already running" |
Every other cue uses the core phrasing — including "Back with …", which the core already adopted from AEC practice.
Two worth emphasizing
Out of scope. In a live coordination meeting, a question that falls outside the contracted scope is easy to absorb without comment, and the cost surfaces weeks later. The Standard takes no position on how such work gets authorized. It requires only that the boundary be named while everyone is present.
Preliminary. This is MUST-level, not a courtesy. An unclosed exhaust calculation repeated to a tenant becomes a commitment the moment they act on it.
Notes on vocabulary
Clash is used in its ordinary coordination sense. It does not imply an automated clash-detection run has been performed.
Do not use Change as a call type. It collides with change orders and implies a commercial decision has already been made.
A participant continuing their own agent on an existing task is not making a Call.
Retention
Ten years is set as a floor, on the reasoning that the record should meet or exceed the statute of repose in the project jurisdiction. Confirm the applicable period locally — this is a floor, not legal advice.
The record should carry the project identifier, the discipline, the drawing or specification section affected, and the identity and licence designation of the approving professional.