Field Q&A

Field Q&A is the STRUX home. You type a question about the project, STRUX reads the project's indexed documents and records, and it answers with the documents it used listed underneath.

It reads the project you have open. There is no document-scoped ask: a question always runs against the whole project, so narrowing by naming the sheet or the spec section in the question itself is how you aim it.

Ask a question

1. Click STRUX in the left rail. You land on the composer.
2. Leave the mode on Auto, or pick one (see below).
3. Type the question and press Enter.
4. Watch the answer build, then read the Sources row underneath it.

The three chips under the composer are starting points, not saved queries. Clicking one fills the composer so you can edit it before sending.

The three modes

The mode switch sits above the composer and sets what submitting does.

Mode	What it does	When to use it
Auto	Reads the question and routes it for you. The hint beside the switch says which way it is leaning: Quick answer or Multi-agent check.	The default. Leave it here unless you have a reason not to.
Ask	A quick factual answer, streamed into the thread with its sources.	You know what you are looking for.
Investigate	A multi-agent check that plans its own set of checks, runs them, and produces findings rather than a paragraph.	You want the system to find problems you have not thought of.

The placeholder text changes with the mode, so you can always tell which one is armed: Auto says "Ask about the drawings, or describe a check to run", Ask says "Ask about the drawings", Investigate says "Describe a check to run".

Investigate spends more and takes longer than Ask, because it is a real run on the VANTAGE engine rather than a single question. It requires the VANTAGE add-on on the project, and it runs from the desktop workspace. Its results are findings, listed as the run progresses through Planning, Analyzing, Advising and Complete, and each one can be accepted or dismissed in place. See VANTAGE for what a run does and Findings for triage.

A follow-up typed into the docked bar at the bottom of a thread inherits the mode the thread started in.

How to phrase a question

STRUX takes plain language. What actually improves an answer is being specific about the artifact.

• Name the sheet, level, or discipline. "What is the slab thickness on level 3 per the structural drawings" retrieves better than "what is the slab thickness".
• Use the document's own words. If the spec says "GFRC panels", ask about GFRC panels rather than fiber-reinforced cladding.
• Cite the section when you have it. A CSI section number or a sheet number in the question narrows the search directly.
• Ask one thing at a time. Compound questions are answered, but the sources attached to a single question are easier to check.
• Use the equipment tag. For equipment questions, the schedule mark ("AHU-1", "VAV-12") is the strongest handle STRUX has.

Reading the answer

While the answer builds, a progress rail shows the three phases STRUX moves through: Understanding, Researching, Composing. A question that never needed project data marks Researching skipped rather than complete, because showing it as complete would claim work that did not happen.

Some answers carry a Confidence bar. It reflects how confident the model reported itself to be on that answer. It is not a measured accuracy rate, and it is not a substitute for opening the source.

Sources

A completed answer shows a Sources row of numbered chips beneath it. A chip carries the document's name, and its sheet number and title where the document has them.

• Hover a chip to see the full document name.
• Click a chip that resolves to a document in this project and the sheet opens in the viewer, so you can read the drawing the answer came from. See Sheet viewer.
• Some chips do not open. A chip that is not clickable was not tied to a document record in this project. Treat it as a pointer to go check, not as confirmation that a specific document was read. Search the Documents page for the name.

Three limits are worth knowing.

Chips link to the document, not to a highlighted region of a page, so expect to scan the sheet once it opens.

Only the newest answer in a thread has openable chips. Scroll back to an earlier answer and its sources are shown as text.

A Sources row is not by itself proof that a document was retrieved. An openable chip is: it resolves to a real document you can read. A non-opening chip is a weaker signal. When an answer matters, open the source and read it rather than treating the row as verification. This is the same discipline the rest of the product is built around, and it applies to citations too.

When STRUX will not answer

This is the part worth trusting. STRUX is instructed never to fabricate a value. If the information is not in the material it read, it says so instead of producing a plausible number.

More usefully, it distinguishes two different failures that look identical in most tools:

• The documents do not contain it. STRUX says the value is not in the drawings or specs it read. That is a real answer, and it usually means the source is missing from the project or the value was never specified.
• STRUX could not reach the data. When a data source is unavailable, STRUX reports that as a gap in its own retrieval, and it will not tell you a value is missing from the drawings on that basis. A retrieval gap is not evidence of absence.

When you ask about a piece of equipment that is not in the project's equipment data, STRUX reports that directly and suggests you check the tag, rather than guessing at a similar mark.

What to do with a refusal: confirm the source document is uploaded and shows Indexed on the Documents page, then rephrase using the document's own vocabulary and ask again. If the document is indexed and the answer is still not there, the content genuinely may not be in it.

Follow-up questions and conversation memory

A thread keeps every turn you have asked in this session, up to 20 turns. When you ask a follow-up, STRUX replays the last four completed turns as context, so pronouns and "and what about level 4" work as you would expect.

The thread lives in the browser tab. Closing the tab or reloading the page clears it. There is no saved conversation history to reopen, and no list of past threads. The History control in the Ask STRUX panel opens the STRUX run feed, which is a record of runs rather than of conversations.

Separately from the thread, STRUX keeps some longer-term memory on the server, so stated preferences can carry between sessions. It is best effort: if it is unavailable, the answer is still produced from the documents.

Attachments

The + button on the follow-up bar adds a file to the project without leaving the conversation. It offers Upload a file, Upload an image, and Take a photo.

Accepted here	.pdf, .jpg, .jpeg, .png, .tiff, .tif
Maximum size	100 MB per file
Where it lands	The current project's Documents

Two things to expect. A file added this way goes through normal document processing, so it is not answerable the instant it uploads; watch for Indexed on the Documents page. And a project that mirrors documents from Autodesk Forma refuses direct uploads, with a message telling you to upload in Forma instead.

The Documents page itself accepts a much wider set of file types and much larger files. Use it for drawing sets and spec books. See Uploading documents.

Asking from somewhere else in the app

You do not have to be on the STRUX page to ask.

• Ask STRUX in the top bar opens a slide-out panel. It does not block the page behind it, so you can keep reading the RFI you are asking about. Escape closes it.
• The panel answers in place for most questions. A question that is really a count against a register takes you to that register, filtered, and states the count beside it. A question that needs a full investigation is handed to the STRUX workspace, which runs it on arrival.
• The starter chips in the panel are shortcuts to real destinations: Run a check, Draft an RFI, New submittal, Find a spec, Open Findings.
• The expand control in the panel header opens the full workspace and carries the question with it.
• The command palette, ⌘K, has an ask row that does the same handoff.
• Linking to /strux?q=your+question opens the workspace with that question and runs it once. The parameter is stripped afterwards, so a refresh will not re-run it and re-spend credits.

Limits

Turns kept in a thread	20
Turns replayed as follow-up context	4 most recent completed
Attachment size and types	100 MB, pdf jpg jpeg png tiff tif
Text taken from any one document into context	12,000 characters
Total context assembled for one question	100,000 characters
Equipment records read into context	200, of which 20 are returned to the answer
Time before the browser gives up on a stalled answer	5 minutes
Questions per day on the shared demo project	10

The character caps are why a very long specification may be answered from part of itself. Naming the section in your question is what steers retrieval to the right part.

Troubleshooting

"Select a project first." STRUX answers about one project's documents. Pick a project in the switcher and ask again.

STRUX says it cannot find something you can see in a document. Check the document's status on the Documents page. Only Indexed documents are searchable. A document can also land Indexed with no extracted content; if the document is indexed and repeated rephrasing still returns nothing, re-process it from the Documents page. See Document processing.

The answer stops with an error and a Retry button. Retry re-sends the same question. The button is hidden when the server has marked the failure as one that retrying cannot fix.

No answer, then a timeout. STRUX gives up after five minutes and says so. Ask a narrower question: a broad question across a large document set is the usual cause.

"Connection lost" partway through an answer. The stream ended before the answer finished. Retry the question.

Out of credits. AI operations stop at a zero balance and you are prompted to top up. Reading the project is unaffected. See Billing.

On the demo project, questions stop after ten. That is the shared demo's daily cap per visitor. Create your own project for unlimited questions.