I had to get new cartridges for my Epson at staples when I realized this whole ass printer and an extra toner pack cost only $15 more than just the epson ink alone

I have a Brother laser that doesn’t have the scanner or any other features, I’ve had it for 3-4 years and have replaced the toner twice. Can’t print in color but who cares?

Oh totally! And it’s so easy to break the laws of physics in a drawing by a human paying full attention!

And also use that model for grading and material details but also renderings (like Revit + Enscape basically)

Autodesk hit me up, I can’t code but I can type a lot of ideas lol

Some plugins have begun surfacing, but I think there’s got to be a market out there for a dedicated landscape documentation product. AutoCAD LA let’s call it. So we can draw material areas and planting areas and drop in furnishings and schedules are filled automatically. So we can model in 3D…

But every professional landscape designer I know uses basic AutoCAD, which is thee classic drafting tool, but there are zero automations or workflows or anything related to our work in terms of materials, furnishings, grading, and especially planting design..

Mainly it’s that there’s great software designed specifically for architects and their related trades (Mechanical, Electrical, Plumbing, etc) and then really solid software for civil engineers, with both featuring lots of smart automation or at least trade-related workflows etc.

Certainly for rendering uses it’s useful. We had to make a park stage in daytime that we’d rendered with Lumion look not only like nighttime (which Lumion could do in a flash) but also crowded with like 2000 people, and my coworkers used one of the visual generators for that and it worked well

Anyway, I don’t have a coup de grace to finish this off, I started laughing at COAT BATH and then spent too long thinking about it for real in relation to my actual work and so bla bla bla long thread. GenAI will never and fundamentally *can* never design buildings or landscapes or anything 8/FIN

If there’s anything I might want automated about my workflow, it’s the repetitive stuff, the stuff where mistakes are made because information isn’t consistent between one drawing and another. And that’s already been automated so well in a smart way (for architects, not landscape architects ffs) 7/?

But Martin, you say, this isn’t about construction docs, this is idea generation, quick iterations with minimal effort, what’s the harm? Why the fuck are you an architect if you want to automate the best part of your job? The only part of your job you learned in school? 6/?

The main thing though is that someone needs to stamp these drawings. Is any architect going to hang their professional liability on GenAI? For their sake I really hope not! She’d need to go through every mark on the paper or PDF to make sure no slop snuck in, hours of extra work finding a needle…5/?

So what’s really left is work on either end of the detail spectrum. Either you think big picture about the whole design and and test stuff out (AI can’t do that) or you’re really in the weeds sorting out details that the automated program can’t do (100% something AI can’t do) 4/?

Software like Revit has automated a *lot* of architectural drafting to the point that it’s almost too easy to go from idea to construction documents (landscape architecture still doesn’t have its own bespoke software still and that makes me insane but that’s a different thread)…3/?

This isn’t a floor plan, this is nonsense. But let’s pretend for a moment that upon improving, AI would get better at this and render text properly and actually put beds in the bedrooms and toilets in the bathroom and have doors to the outside, even then, it’s still hot garbage… 2/?

Nothing has made me more sure that generative AI isn’t a threat to my job

Boss Metal Zone with no knobs and the rubber pad missing if you can find one

For landscape architects, "can you help with my garden?"

Honestly one of the best movies about Catholicism I’ve seen, so deeply nuanced and empathetic when it could have gone an easier route