Drake Automation
A construction scheduling platform with an AI chat, plus bots automating Buildertrend across 12+ projects.
The project
The Schedule Planner is an internal web app that models and validates construction schedules alongside Buildertrend (still the official source of truth). It adds the logic Buildertrend handles poorly: homeowner decision tasks, special inspections and real task dependencies. Best of all: an AI assistant you can tell “move framing one week and adjust everything that depends on it” — and it does. Big changes that took hours now take minutes.
What it does
- AI planning chat: add, move, connect or delete tasks in natural language.
- Real construction logic: HO tasks (owner decisions, 20 days ahead) and SI tasks (inspections, the day after their milestone).
- Business-day engine: Mon–Fri dates only, FS/SS dependencies and 20 coded phases (Pre-Con → Closeout).
- Full Gantt: zoom, phase filters, undo/redo, autosave and Excel/CSV export.
- Buildertrend bot: bulk date updates across 12+ projects via browser (no API).
How it was built
Connections & integrations
- Anthropic Claude — schedule assistant via own proxy
- Turso (libSQL) — serverless cloud database
- Buildertrend — official source of truth + bulk-update bot
- Render — auto-deploy from main
- Excel / CSV — import and export for the team workflow
Method
Buildertrend remains the source of truth: the planner models and validates before touching the official system · strict data conventions (typed task IDs, coded phases, noon-ISO dates to avoid timezone bugs) · human-in-the-loop on every bulk change.