Answers, Straight.

CoLateral is a canvas workspace for structural engineering paired with a suite of roughly forty browser-based design tools. The tools cover steel, concrete, wood and mass timber, masonry, and foundations, plus climatic, snow, and drift data for Canadian sites. Around the calculations, the workspace ingests drawings and PDFs, organizes RFIs, shop drawings, and site-review notes, and drafts the written outputs that go with them, each tied back to the source documents and assumptions that informed it.

Every tool shares one project context, so a member you draw once flows to the tool that designs it. Draw a beam in the Schematic Frame Designer and route it to the Steel Beam Designer: the handoff carries the span, line loads, and trial section, the designer prefills those values and lists exactly what was applied, and the section you settle on is written back to the drawn beam. The schematic and the design tool never show two different members.

The same routing covers columns, walls, wood members, and connections, and the concrete column tool seeds the column-to-footing handoff for the foundation workflow. Imported values are starting inputs only - the engineer verifies everything.

Today: IFC and DXF import and export in the Schematic Frame Designer for Revit and CAD coordination, PDF ingestion for drawing sets, and a MASS handoff export for masonry design forces. NBC load criteria and the CSA design standards used by the calculators are embedded in the tools themselves, so no external code library is needed.

Connectors to analysis packages (ETABS, SAP2000, RAM, RISA), BIM platforms (Revit, Tekla), and project management tools (Procore, Bluebeam) are planned, prioritized by what pilot firms actually use. The tools page tracks what is embedded, in progress, and planned.

The repeatable work around the engineering, not the engineering judgment itself. CoLateral sets up first-pass design checks across the tool suite, runs column load takedowns, pulls climatic and snow-load data, indexes drawing sets, and drafts RFI responses, shop-drawing comments, field-review notes, and calculation summaries from your project context. Every draft enters as a reviewable item, not a finished deliverable.

The calculators are screening and design-aid tools, not a replacement for a full structural model or code-checking workflow. Visual analyzers produce indicative diagrams to communicate intent and are not design-adequate on their own. CoLateral does not handle highly irregular structures, does not certify or stamp work, and does not replace independent verification against the governing code. Treat its outputs as a faster starting point, bounded by the inputs and assumptions you give it.

You do. CoLateral prepares reviewable drafts and organizes project intelligence; professional judgment and accountability stay with the responsible engineer. Generated calculation summaries expose their inputs, assumptions, method, governing checks, and limitations precisely so they can be checked. No CoLateral output should be used externally without engineer review, approval, and sign-off.

Dashboard project data is held locally in your browser, and every draft records which files it referenced and what assumptions it drew. The AI layer runs on guardrails rather than open-ended autonomy: each agent declares exactly which tools it may call, no agent escalates its own permissions, outputs are source-backed and carry a confidence value, and high-stakes outputs route through a human-review checkpoint before anything touches official project records.

Structural engineering consultants, from solo practitioners to small and mid-size firms. It is most valuable for engineers who manage RFIs, shop drawing reviews, site observations, and project documentation alongside their calculation work, and for firms that want to turn scattered templates and legacy files into repeatable, auditable workflows.