Climatic Data
NBC 2020 / OBC SB-1 climatic design-value lookup by province and city - snow, wind, rain, design temperatures, and elevation.
Demos
See the workspace do the work.
CoLateral is an agentic engineering workspace: an infinite canvas of your project, driven by the AI agent you already pay for, running on your own machine against your own files. Every capability below is one it has today, shown on its own, with a recording of it in the workspace.
Project canvasCommand barTerminals and agentsBuild your own toolsDocuments and PDFsSheets and notesSketches and diagramsPresent and recoverLocal-first
The recordings are being cut one capability at a time. Where a stage still shows a play glyph and “recording being cut”, the feature is built and the video is not - the copy beside it describes what the workspace already does.
01Project canvas
The whole job, laid out on one infinite canvas
Pan and zoom across a canvas that holds the project as objects rather than as a folder tree: notes, spreadsheets, documents, images, to-dos, calendars, slideshows, terminals, sketches and references, each in its own card, arranged the way you would arrange paper on a desk.
- Folders and regions that really contain what you drag into them, so a canvas can be tidied instead of just moved around.
- Connections drawn between cards, a minimap for the long haul, and a command palette for everything else.
- Autosave, undo and redo, and version history, so rearranging is never a decision you have to be sure about.
Where it stopsOne canvas, one person. There is no multi-user mode, no presence and no shared cursors - a licence covers one machine, and the project on it is yours alone.
Recording being cut
02Command bar
Say what you want done. Your own agent does it.
The command bar is the intelligence layer of the canvas. You type a request; the Claude Code or Codex CLI you are already signed in to runs it headlessly through the Local Bridge, reads the files the request is about, and works in rounds until the job is done.
- No CoLateral API key and no CoLateral inference bill - the agent is the subscription you already pay for.
- A multi-round action loop with streaming output, so you watch the work instead of waiting for a result.
- Attachments and voice input, for the requests that are easier to show or say than to type.
Where it stopsCoLateral ships no model of its own. If neither CLI is installed and signed in on the machine, the command bar has nothing to run and says so.
Recording being cut
03Terminals and agents
A real terminal in a card, and an agent that can act on the canvas
A terminal card is a genuine pty, running Claude Code or Codex inside the workspace rather than in a window next to it. From there an agent reaches back onto the canvas through a control channel: it can read what is there, create and change cards, and lay work out beside the files it came from.
- Every action the agent asks for is classified as read, mutate or deny before anything happens.
- Permission mode is set per card - ask, auto or bypass - so a scratch card and the project canvas do not have to be trusted the same way.
- The terminal is the same one you would use anyway, so nothing has to be learned to fall back to typing commands.
Where it stopsAn agent is powerful inside the workspace and blind outside it. It works through the classification gate, and a denied action is refused rather than negotiated.
Recording being cut
04Build your own tools
Describe the tool you need, then let the agent drive it
The calculation you keep redoing in a spreadsheet can be a tool instead. Describe what it should take in, what it should work out and what it should report, and it is built as an embedded tool card on your canvas, next to the sheet and the drawing it belongs to.
- The agent drives any embedded tool through generic DOM introspection - it reads the fields and controls that are there.
- So a tool you invented this afternoon is agent-drivable this afternoon, with no integration work and nothing to register.
- It stays on your canvas, in your project, and can be edited by asking for the change.
Where it stopsWhat you get is an HTML tool on your own canvas. There is no marketplace, nothing is published anywhere, and CoLateral does not review or certify what a tool computes - that judgement stays yours.
Recording being cut
05Documents and PDFs
Read and mark up the paperwork where the work is
Drawings, specifications, vendor data and reports open as cards on the canvas: PDFs to read and annotate, DOCX to read, images, CSV and plain text, all sitting beside the calculation that depends on them instead of in a downloads folder.
- PDF viewing and annotation, so a markup lives with the project rather than in a separate reviewer.
- Import and export at the card level - what comes in can go back out.
- A reference card keeps the source next to the number that came from it.
Where it stopsThis is document work, not model work. CoLateral does not open a DWG or an RVT, and there is no CAD kernel behind any of it.
Recording being cut
06Sheets and notes
A spreadsheet with a real formula engine, beside the note that explains it
The spreadsheet card computes - it has its own formula engine, not a picture of one. Around it sit the notes, to-dos, calendars and textboxes that carry the reasoning, the outstanding questions and the dates the job actually turns on.
- Formulas, columns and cells that behave the way an engineer expects when a number changes.
- Notes and to-dos that stay attached to the part of the canvas they are about.
- Calendars and slideshows for the parts of a project that are a schedule or a story rather than a calculation.
Where it stopsIt is a spreadsheet, not Excel. Large workbooks, macros and pivot tables are outside what the engine implements, and it is honest about which formulas it knows.
Recording being cut
07Sketches and diagrams
Sketch it roughly, keep it beside the numbers
A drawing card takes the sketch you would otherwise do on the back of a page - a layout, an arrangement, a marked-up idea - recognises the shapes in it, and keeps it on the canvas as a 2D diagram that the rest of the project can point at.
- Freehand strokes tidied into recognised SVG shapes rather than left as ink.
- Diagrams that sit in the same space as the sheet, the note and the document they describe.
- Connections from a sketch to the cards it explains, so the intent survives the week.
Where it stopsSketch recognition and 2D diagrams only. There is no 3D view, no WebGL model and no finite-element solver anywhere behind this.
Recording being cut
08Present and recover
Walk someone through it, and get yesterday back
The canvas doubles as the deck. Presentation mode moves through the project card by card at the zoom you chose, and everything behind it - autosave, undo and redo, version history - means the walkthrough is the live project rather than a copy that has already drifted.
- Presentation mode, a minimap, and a command palette that reaches anything without hunting for it.
- Autosave with version history, so an experiment on a live project is a reversible decision.
- Undo and redo across the canvas itself, not only inside a single card.
Where it stopsHistory is local to the machine that made it. There is no cloud copy, no shared review link, and nobody else can open the project while you present it.
Recording being cut
09Local-first
A desktop app that keeps your projects on your machine
CoLateral is a Tauri desktop application. Projects live on the disk in front of you, the agent runs as the CLI you signed in to, and the workspace points at the folders you already keep your work in rather than asking you to move it somewhere new.
- Local-first storage: nothing is uploaded to a CoLateral project server, because there is not one.
- Project folders on your own disk are the connector that matters, and it is the one that is real.
- One licence, one machine - which is also why there is no account to lose your work behind.
Where it stopsGmail, Google Drive and OneDrive are named as connectors and are largely declarative today. Do not plan around them yet; plan around the folder.
Recording being cut
Tools that ship with a seat
Building your own is the point, but a seat does not start empty. These are the analysis and reference utilities that come installed - project intake, drawing and PDF work, sheet indexing, section properties, Canadian climatic data. Each has its own page describing what it does and where it stops. Discipline suites are expansion packs; none of them is available or for sale.
Reference Data
1Design Checker
1Climatic Data Map - Canada
Interactive map lookup of NBC 2020 Appendix C climatic and Site Class C seismic values for major Canadian cities.
Drawing / Ingestion
3Drawing Intake (AI)
Upload drawings, review AI-suggested walls, openings, lintels, and project info with evidence, then generate a draft schematic layout.
PDF Merge & Reorder
Drop one PDF onto another to merge, drag pages into any order, rotate or remove pages, then export a single combined PDF - all in the browser.
PDF Sheet Indexer
Ingests PDF drawing sets and builds a structured sheet index with revision history and delta-sheet flags.
Project Admin
1Project Intake
Captures project metadata and assumptions into project memory for downstream coordination.
What these demos do not claim
The fastest way to lose an engineer is to let them find the boundary themselves. So here it is up front, and again beside every capability above.
No collaboration, no cloud project
There is no multi-user mode, no presence, no shared cursors and no shared review link. One licence covers one machine, and a project lives on that machine rather than on a CoLateral server - because there is not one.
No CAD kernel and no solver
Modelling here means sketch recognition and 2D diagrams. CoLateral does not open a DWG or an RVT, has no 3D view, and runs no finite-element analysis. What it is good at is holding the drawing, the number and the reasoning in one place.
Reviewable output, not certified work
Everything the workspace produces is a draft for a qualified person to check. CoLateral exposes the inputs, the assumptions and the steps so the work can be verified; it does not certify, stamp, or take responsibility for a design.
The canvas is easier to use than to watch.
A seat is the workspace and everything on it: the canvas, the command bar, the terminal and agent cards, documents and sheets and notes, and the ability to build the tool you need by describing it.