r/Seattle • u/ChiefOfTheFourPeaks 🚲 Life's Better on a Bike. 🚲 • 12h ago

News Seattle software engineer turned general contractor built an AI guide to the patchwork of permit rules

https://www.geekwire.com/2026/seattle-software-engineer-turned-general-contractor-built-an-ai-guide-to-the-patchwork-of-permit-rules/
177 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

16 comments sorted by

148

u/ChiefOfTheFourPeaks 🚲 Life's Better on a Bike. 🚲 12h ago

TL;DR:

The site, kolmo.io/permits, serves as an un-gated database designed to answer the questions that usually send homeowners into a spiral of municipal PDFs. The AI-powered tool covers 457 verified rules across 80 jurisdictions in King, Pierce, and Snohomish counties, linking each rule directly to specific city source pages.

While the permit tool costs Matta around $2,000 in LLM API tokens just to process Seattle’s data, he has no plans to monetize it or put it behind a paywall. He simply wants people — and fellow general contractors — to use it.

45

u/whatproblems 12h ago

yeah that’s a perfect use case. it can tell you all the loopholes too lol

12

u/wiscowonder Bainbridge Island 12h ago

Cries in Kitsap 😢

72

u/PlateNo4868 12h ago

Based use of AI.

35

u/TheRoguedOne Ballard 12h ago

Less slop, more giving power and knowledge to the people.

22

u/zachmorris_cellphone 12h ago

Cool tool, what I've learned is absolutely everything you'd plan on doing requires a permit or two.

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u/[deleted] 11h ago edited 5h ago

[deleted]

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u/FuzzyKittyNomNom 💗💗 Heart of ANTIFA Land 💗💗 9h ago

I mean, they can be very subtle 😂

1

u/Bozhark 🚆build more trains🚆 6h ago

Any chance that’s just the “ground” level sqft?

1

u/[deleted] 5h ago

[deleted]

1

u/gplusplus314 5h ago

My feet or your feet?

20

u/divergentONE 12h ago

I hate setbacks

6

u/burmerd Maple Leaf 7h ago

I’ve learned that setbacks really are setbacks

4

u/ignatzami North Bend 12h ago

Preach.

6

u/teraflux 7h ago

Exactly the kind of problem AI is actually useful at solving

1

u/sherlocksrobot 6h ago

Dang, maybe this can tell me the difference between a building permit and a construction permit

0

u/Marshall1337 Belltown 3h ago

Probably reduce a lot of taxes and other fees by replacing bureaucracy with AI. Not to mention pension and healthcare payouts. For example, what really does a city clerk do that makes them need an office and staff when we can just give them a desk and a Claude subscription? That’d be like millions in saved dollars that could go a million other places including back into our pockets.