Ask Layr, the project chat in the right sidebar, is on for everyone on layrbuild.app. It searches and reads the project, explains an item the way an estimator would, and marks up any sheet where you ask. It is much faster and cheaper than it was a week ago. Text boxes get three Autofit modes, and search finds labels a PDF draws as small pictures.
The chat in the right sidebar is on in production. Anyone in a project can ask it to search the project, read a sheet or a spec, explain an item, or mark up a sheet. The flag ui:askLayr moved from review to released. (#913)
Ask marks up a page by its page id, whether or not you have it open. Its markups appear on your screen as they land, with no refresh. You can keep working, or change sheets, while it runs. Undo leaves its markups alone. A second tab open on the same page no longer overwrites them. (#911)
A text box from Ask fills the words or the box it targets and takes their size, so it can cover old text and replace it. Ask can preview where a markup will go before it draws. (#907)
Colors for each part, border type and weight, fill and hatches, and text style. Ask a markup to look a certain way and it does. (#903)
A question is now one request to the server, and the parts of the prompt that repeat are cached. On an addendum task, cost dropped from $9.23 to $0.85, and time from 11 minutes to 84 seconds. (#906, #911)
Ask decodes a callout with the set’s own key. It traces the item through schedules, details, specs, and addenda. It labels each fact confirmed, inferred, or open, and shows its work so a senior estimator could check it. (#904)
A skill is a short playbook for one kind of task. Two ship today: “Apply an addendum item” and “Find things in a project.” Ask loads one when a task calls for it. Admins view and edit skills at /admin/ask, with every saved version kept. The same page lists every tool Ask can use. (#908)
The panel has Chat, History, and Saved views. Pin an answer to save it. A saved answer stays even if you delete its chat. The panel can pop out into its own window. (#900)
Deleting a chat hides it from you. We keep it, so we can learn from how people really use Ask. (#905)
The text style card has PowerPoint’s three Autofit modes for Text, Note, Callout, and Cloud+ boxes. Fit shape grows or shrinks the box’s height to its words. Shrink text keeps the box and makes the text smaller when it would overflow. No autofit keeps the box and lets extra words run past it. No autofit is the new default. A box you draw keeps the size you drew. Older boxes still grow to fit their words. (#899)
Some PDFs draw short labels as tiny pictures, not text. Addendum item numbers like “AD1.1” are one example. Layr now reads those pictures with OCR and adds the words where the text layer has none. Search, Select Text, and Ask can then find them. This applies to files uploaded from now on. Photos, logos, and full-page scans are not read. (#909)
On the admin Usage page, every range now ends today, so today’s activity shows. You can also pick a custom date range. (#901)
126_ask_saved.sql adds ask_saved for saved answers. 127_ask_conversation_soft_delete.sql adds ask_conversations.deleted_at, so deleting a chat hides it instead of erasing it. 128_ask_skills.sql adds ask_skills and the append-only ask_skill_versions, seeded with two skills. Dev already applied all three. Production applies them through deploy.yml on merge, before the new code. Do not apply them by hand.ui:askLayr is now released. No other flag changed.OPEN_ROUTER_API_KEY on the Vercel production project. It is now set. Without it, Ask answers 503.PAGE_OCR_FILL=0 to turn OCR fill-in off.package.json’s version is 0.42.0.