in this interview.
- His workshop on MCP (Model Context Protocol), the way LLMs connect to tools
- Giving AI agents access to engineering software, and prototyping new ways for engineers to work with them
- Why AI models are suddenly getting better at reasoning in 3D, and what that could mean for Rhino and Revit
- How agentic coding has changed hackathons: less time on technical problems, more focus on the product and the idea
- His hackathon project with Gaussian splats, a technology he had never touched before the weekend
- AECTech's growth, from the week-long main event in New York to AECTech+ events on the West Coast, in Europe, Boston and soon Tokyo
transcript.
0:00 yeah, we can we can get started. So. So we're here in Boston for some awesome events this weekend. And now I'm sitting with Sergey. Sergey, do you wanna introduce yourself? Hi there, I'm Sergey. I'm a senior associate applications engineer at CORE studio. And yeah, excited to be here in Boston with you. Yeah. So we just we just covered up that weekend hackathon here for AECTech+, which was super exciting. And yesterday we also hosted a workshop at your place TT, which is one of the biggest engineering firms here in the US. Right. Do you wanna do you want to talk a little bit about the stuff you went through and what you are working on right now? Sure. Yeah.
0:36 So in the workshop we're talking about MCP or Model Context Protocol, a way for LLMs to interact with tools. So that was pretty fun. I lost my voice after speaking for six hours. But it's back today. But it's back today. Yes. Yeah. The night is young. Yeah. And for the most part, like, we've been doing a lot of AI. At CORE, I'm also part of the CORE AI group who kind of have a lot of different arms. Yeah. But, yeah. A lot of agents, trying to give agents access to engineering tools and then, like, prototyping different organic ways of for our engineers to interact with them.
1:17 So, yeah, what would you say is the most exciting thing within AI for engineering, like, right now, doesn't have to be something you're working on, just like in general. I think lately there have been like a really odd uptick in the model's ability to reason in 3D. Like, that's one thing that the models have been consistently terrible at for, like the fable 5.6 fable and 5.6, you know, updates kind of, like yeah, they feel different. I wouldn't say that they're still at the point where, like, I can throw them into, you know, Rhino or Revit and like have them do meaningful things. But you know, it's the same like uptick we felt in the beginning of the year with like agentic coding when like Claude 4 five felt different.
2:06 There is another you know I'm expecting kind of a rapid increase in capability there. So yeah, it's gonna open up like a, a whole new set of tools to, to be able to build with LLMs. I hope so. Yeah. I mean, it's gonna it's gonna be interesting. We'll see. I also don't really know why this is happening. Like the words on the street, I heard that the labs finally started paying someone to, like, supply them with high quality kind of spatial data. I don't know if that's true. But, yeah, it seems like the new frontier where we see a lot of improvement. I think now that they've shipped, you know, Claude in Excel, finally they have time for some other stuff.
2:46 Yeah. Yeah, exactly. They wrapped up the the main multiplier. Yeah. And this week we had a hackathon. Right. You guys at AECTech+ from the CORE studio team at Thornton Tomasetti. You host these pretty often. Right. And could you talk a little bit about that? Sure. So we have our main event which is in November in New York. And that's like the week long thing, week long thing, you know, with workshops. And we do these things called tech crawls, where we go around different offices of other architectural engineering firms in New York. Symposium. Hackathon is kind of, you know, everybody just, everybody at CORE just goes off the radar for a week.
3:26 Like, friends and family can't find them when there's AECTech. Yeah. And then we do smaller kind of satellite events. So AECTech+ is us trying to franchise this out. And, you know, we done a few events on the West Coast. If you haven't in Europe, Boston, there's one coming up in Tokyo which is going to be very exciting. Oh, Tokyo. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. Do you guys do a lot of work there? We have some industry partners that we work with, so they were pretty excited to to host us. Yeah. No. Cool. And what do you think about the the stuff that was built today? You worked on a project.
4:03 It was pretty interesting. Could you talk about that and maybe some other stuff? Sure. It was pretty fun. We got to play around with Gaussian splats, which I had no experience with before starting this hackathon, which is kind of the point, the most demo friendly technology, the most known to man. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So that was pretty good. But I think in general, I think like the level of work has increased really significantly. Yeah. Ever since, you know, agentic coding became a thing. Yeah. Like, people don't seem to struggle as much with the technical aspects. So a lot of the focus has shifted to products and how good your idea is. And yeah, that's kind of exciting to see.
4:46 Yeah, I think that's a nice aspect, especially of these events that, you know, when those things become more important, qualities like teamwork also increase. Like we were also here working for this weekend and we came together. You know, as previous software developers, together with some architects and some people on the construction side and like really just try to try to gather the best of the the different viewpoints and angles people have. Yeah. That was nice. Yeah. No, but yeah. Thank you for for talking to us. Sergey. That's been super nice. I think we're getting kicked out now or something pretty soon, so. So we should drop this out. But. Yeah, that's. That's finalized. Boston trip. Cheers.
