Architecture, Engineering and Construction

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 them however you normally would. Core §7.2.1 accepts question, study, and analysis on any of these, so "code question", "load study", and "coordination question" all open the loop — which is how these words came out of the recordings in the first place.

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.

Code and Cut sheet are different calls, and the line between them is worth stating because it is where a room will hesitate. A Code call has a determinate answer: what is the clearance in front of a panel. A Cut sheet call is the one where the answer depends on this project — can this panel go in that room — and resolving it means pulling many requirements plus the real constraints into a single recommendation.

Coordination absorbed Clash and Routing. Both earlier words described the same conversation, and "clash" carried a suggestion of automated clash detection that was never intended.

Pricing and Value engineering were split out of a single Price call. Asking what something costs and asking for a cheaper way to do it are different questions with different owners, and answering one when the other was asked wastes the exchange.

Ownership

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 — Ready, Hold, Clarify, Heard, Mine, Prompting now, Adder, Go ahead, Preliminary, Status, 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

None. This profile uses the core phrasing for every cue.

Earlier drafts declared two substitutions — "Listening" for acknowledge and "Already running" for already_owned — described as recorded from real coordination meetings. They were checked against the recording in v0.5 and neither phrase appears in it. Both were removed rather than re-justified.

If your coordination rooms genuinely say something else, that is a substitution worth declaring — but declare it from a recording, not from taste. Note that acknowledge is locked (Core §7.3) and cannot be substituted by any profile.

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.