The hour after the site visit
Walking the slab is engineering. Reading the bearing, catching the crack that does not belong on a six-week-old pour, deciding whether the shoring is adequate - that is the work a licensed engineer trained years to do. Then you get back to the desk, and the next hour is something else entirely: turning a page of observation notes and a phone full of photos into the narrative report that will carry your seal and live in the project record for decades.
That hour is clerical, and everyone in the practice knows it. It is the hour that gets pushed to 9pm after a long day in the field. It is where a tired principal retypes the same OBC clause for the hundredth time, hunts for the photo that backs up an observation, and rebuilds the firm's standard limitations paragraph from the last report. None of it is judgment. All of it has to be right, because the seal makes the engineer accountable for every line.
Fermito exists to give that hour back, without moving the seal an inch.
What Fermito does, start to finish
Fermito sits at one specific moment in the work: after the observations exist, before the document does. Here is the path a report takes through it.
- Notes in, from wherever you took them. A voice memo dictated on site, a drafter's written summary, a list of observations typed on a phone, a markup you exported from another tool. Dictation runs through transcription so you can talk through a site walk instead of typing it up later, and in your first language if that is how the notes came out.
- Photos, captioned and anchored. The site photos you took become captioned figures in the report, tied to the observations they support, not a loose appendix nobody reads.
- A draft in the firm's voice. Fermito does not produce generic AI prose. It writes against your firm's templates, standard callouts, and house conventions, so the draft reads like your practice's own work. Every revision your engineers make teaches it a little more of how the firm writes.
- Fact-checked against the evidence. Before you ever see the draft, Fermito checks its claims against the notes and photos behind them, so the report does not assert what the evidence does not support - the exact failure mode that turns a sealed document into a liability.
- Held behind a review step. The draft does not become a deliverable on its own. It waits for an engineer to read it, edit it, and take ownership.
- Out as the sealed document. Once the engineer signs off, Fermito produces the finished report in the firm's house format, archived and owned by the firm rather than trapped in a chat window.
It drafts. You sign.
The most important thing Fermito does is the thing it refuses to do: it never stands between the engineer and the seal.
Nothing it produces is auto-signed, auto-sent, or auto-filed. The sealed document does not download until an engineer affirms they have reviewed the content and are taking ownership of it, and that attestation is recorded - who reviewed, when, and what they acknowledged. If your regulator or a tribunal ever asks how the firm ensures quality over an AI-drafted report, that record is the answer.
This is the line between an assistant and a generator, and it is structural, not marketing. We worked through why that distinction decides whether a tool fits inside professional liability frameworks in a separate piece. The short version: Fermito drafts, suggests, and stops at the seal. The judgment stays with the P.Eng, where the law puts it.
What it is good at, and what it is not
It helps to be precise about the lane.
Fermito is good at the narrative deliverable: site review reports, field reviews, and sealed opinion letters - load review, shoring, coring, feasibility. The output is the professional opinion, in the firm's voice, fact-checked against its evidence, behind a review-and-seal workflow that records who took ownership.
Fermito does not do your engineering. It does not run the analysis, size the member, or model the structure. Your design and analysis software - Revit, AutoCAD, Tekla, RISA, SAP2000, STAAD - does that, and Fermito has no interest in that lane. It does not mark up drawings, and it is not a project-management system. It starts only once the observations and the judgment exist and the question becomes: how does this become the document I will seal?
Put another way: Fermito does not touch the part of the job that is engineering. It touches the part that is writing.
Where it sits in your stack
If your firm already runs a design suite, a drawing tool, and a project-management platform, Fermito does not replace any of them. It sits downstream of all of them, at the site-visit-to-sealed-report moment none of them was built for.
The field notes can come from anywhere - a voice memo, a drafter's writeup, a markup exported from Bluebeam. Fermito turns them into a firm-voiced draft, holds it behind a review step, and produces the sealed deliverable your engineer signs.
If the question on your mind is whether this overlaps with the construction software you already pay for, we worked through exactly how the stack divides in a companion piece. The one-line version:
Your design tools size the structure. Your drawing tools mark it up. Fermito writes the report you sign and seal.
That last layer is the one no platform on the board is built to do, and it is the only one Fermito does.
