Claude designed a full MEP system for a random house plan

Solvaix@Solvaix

I FOUND A RANDOM HOUSE PLAN ONLINE AND ASKED CLAUDE TO DESIGN THE ENTIRE MEP SYSTEM

It was just a floor plan. Two floors, 20 rooms, 15 fixtures. No pipes, no ducts, no wiring. Just walls and doors.

I told Claude to figure out all the plumbing, HVAC and electrical systems, following US building codes.

And this is where it got interesting.

It tried 1,353 different drain layouts. 1,272 failed. Some routes took a long detour around a beam. Others put the main stack right in the middle of an open room. Some didn't leave enough room for the pipe to maintain its required slope.

Only 81 options made it through. Claude picked the best one.

Then came the water supply. The shortest pipe layout looked good on paper, until Claude calculated you'd have to wait a full minute for hot water at the far sink. So it scrapped that design and moved to a manifold next to the heater. Wait time dropped to 19 seconds.

Then it worked through the HVAC and electrical systems: 12 rooms with supply air, 77 outlets, 30 circuits and 8 smoke alarms.

When it was done, it checked its own design against 18 code requirements. All 18 passed.

Honestly, the best part is watching all the failed designs pop up in red and seeing exactly what went wrong each time.

Still, Claude is checking its own work here. A real engineer would need to review and approve everything before construction.