Price the next job from your own last ten —
and see which ten

The estimate is the business. Most small contractors carry their pricing in one person's memory, and the historical cost data that would check it sits unread in closed job folders. This reads those folders. It does not invent a rate. It finds the rate you charged, on the document you charged it on, and shows you the line.

The tender came in Monday: four hundred and some metres of 12-inch in clay, under a county road, a creek crossing at the far end. The owner wants a number Thursday. You have done this bore six or seven times in ten years, and the numbers are in a folder of PDFs the office kept, the estimator's spreadsheet, and your memory of which ones hurt.

The documents that hold the real answer are ordinary. The bore log — pilot, ream passes, pull-back, the depth at the creek. The daily drilling report. The field ticket for each day — labour, equipment, mud and additives — signed by the company rep before the crew left site. The job-cost report the bookkeeper ran after close-out, actuals beside estimate. And the compliance file: the COR certificate, the WCB clearance letter, the insurance certificate, the prequalification questionnaire.

The questions you would ask out loud are short. What did we get a metre on the last one like this? What did the mud cost on the creek crossing? Did we bill the standby or eat it? When does the COR come up? Each has an answer in a document you already own. The problem has never been the answer. It is finding the document.

Strategic Agent reads the job folders and answers with a line out of a document, not a sentence about it — at most three verbatim lines, at most two citations, each with the document's id and line numbers. The shape of it, with the one worked example this site permits: the founder's own historic job record, nobody else's.

That last row is the product, not a failure. A tool that guessed the expiry from the file name would sound exactly as confident as one that had read the certificate. This one says it does not know, and the manifest says why: the file is a photograph, not yet readable.

Language models are unreliable at multi-step arithmetic, and a bid is nothing but multi-step arithmetic. So the model in this product never does a sum. It retrieves and quotes; ordinary, testable code does the multiplication and shows the working. The anchor test is the founder's own job — 376 metres at $834.95 a metre — and the code must reproduce the total exactly, every run, or the build stops. Nothing on the bid became true without you: the software proposes a figure and shows where it came from, and you accept it or hold it. Only accepted figures enter the record.

Field tickets come in two kinds. The digital ones — a PDF out of a ticketing app, a spreadsheet the office keeps — are read today, line by line. The carbon copy photographed on a phone at the end of the day is catalogued, kept and reported as unread; it is not searchable yet. The queue of scanned drilling paper waiting to be read by machine stands at 0 of 883 candidates in the founder's own records, and this page will say so until the number moves.

The prequalification file is a better fit than it looks. The registry asks the same questions every renewal, and last year's answers are in last year's submission, saved as a PDF. Ask what you put down for the incident-rate question and it quotes that line. It does not fill the form and it does not submit it.

It does not price the job; it finds what you priced the last one at and proves it. It does not write the bid, send the invoice or move a dollar. It does not know the ground; it knows what your crew wrote down about the ground. It does not read a CAD file — it reads .txt .md .csv .xlsx .docx .pdf and, for scans, OCR — and old .doc and .xls files have no reader yet. And nothing is required to leave the shop: it runs on the machine in your office, the model that reads your text runs there too, and it refuses to start a component that would post your files to somebody else.