Ask practical NZ residential construction questions — treatment, materials, fixings, sequencing, scope, variations. Built for working builders.
The Foreman is a chat assistant for practical NZ residential building questions — materials, methods, sequencing, scope, and what belongs in an estimate. It is deliberately narrow, and what it refuses to do is as considered as what it answers.
Scope and inclusions are the strongest use: what goes in a deck estimate, what is commonly missed on a bathroom quote, what a fair exclusion list for a reroof looks like. Those are the questions where a builder's memory competes with a checklist, and a checklist wins.
It is also built for variations — how to word rock found in post holes, whether a mid-job cladding change is a variation, how to describe rot found in framing once the linings are off.
You can point it at a job type to focus the conversation: deck, fence, bathroom, reroof, windows and joinery, retaining wall, or a general renovation.
It is not Help Chat. Help Chat answers questions about using CostMate itself — accounts, billing, where a button is. The Foreman answers questions about building.
It will not size a member for a span, will not decide whether work needs consent, will not make a bracing determination, and will not give you a price or a rate.
Those limits are enforced in two places. The assistant is instructed not to make those calls, and then a separate deterministic guard runs over the generated text before it reaches you and replaces that kind of assertion with a prompt to confirm with your engineer or the BCA. The second layer exists because instructions alone are not a control.
It caveats rather than stonewalling. Ask what size bearer a 4m span needs and it will not give you a size, but it will tell you which inputs decide it — loaded dimension, what sits above, timber grade — and who signs it off. A bare refusal would be less useful and no safer.
The Foreman is guidance, not a determination. Confirm anything structural with your engineer, and anything consent-related with your BCA, before you rely on it.