What is CRAIN?
CRAIN — Construction Decision AI
CRAIN is an AI-powered option-evaluation tool for Senior Program Managers in commercial interior office construction. It replaces the 2–3 week roundtrip of emailing architects, GCs, cost managers, and schedulers every time a problem comes up on site.
The core loop
- Load the project once — scope, schedule, budget, vendors, specs, client priorities, building rules
- Raise an issue when something comes up on site ("10-ton HVAC unit doesn't fit through the mech room door")
- CRAIN generates 4 evaluated solution paths — each with cost, schedule impact, pros, cons, risks, and a tradeoff statement, grounded in your specific project context
- What-if chat — ask CRAIN to re-evaluate if the client pushes back, combine options, or stress-test an approach
- Vendor validation packets — CRAIN drafts targeted emails to only the vendors whose input is actually needed, for you to send one click
- Send a client memo — CRAIN produces a professional plain-text decision memo. You review, edit, hit send
- Two-layer memory — when the memo sends, CRAIN extracts durable learnings and classifies each as project-scope (applies to this one project) or client-scope (applies to every project you run for this client, now and future). Both layers feed every subsequent option generation
Who it's for
Senior Program Managers running Class-A commercial interior fit-outs. You have architects, GCs, MEP engineers, FF&E dealers, AV integrators, and cost managers all feeding you information. You sit in the middle and have to package decisions for the client. CRAIN is the tool that lets you say yes in a day instead of three weeks.What it isn't
- A replacement for licensed engineers, architects, or cost consultants — CRAIN's numbers are first-order estimates that need vendor validation for anything above ~$25K
- A permitting or code-compliance tool — it flags when code review is needed, it doesn't produce stamped documents
- A PM software replacement (Procore, PlanGrid, Bluebeam) — it's an overlay that reads the material those tools produce
Tech stack
- Next.js 16 (Turbopack) + React 19 + Tailwind v4
- Prisma 5 + SQLite
- OpenRouter API → Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4.5 for all reasoning
- Brevo for outbound client/vendor email and inbound email parsing
- VPS hosted, Let's Encrypt SSL, PM2 process manager
- Live at https://crain.singletask.ai, port 3300