Resources

Getting started

What to do in your first hour, and the habits that make the second hour cheaper than the first. Everything here comes from onboarding real firms, including the things we wish they had known before their first session.

1. Before your first session

• BIM Monkey runs on Revit 2024 through 2027 on Windows. Revit LT is not supported.
• Close Revit before running the installer. The installer replaces the add-in for every Revit version it finds.
• Keep one Revit version open at a time while you use Banana Chat. Two versions open at once confuses the connection.
• You need two keys: your BIM Monkey key from the welcome email, and an Anthropic API key from console.anthropic.com. Revit chat runs on your Anthropic key. The web app runs on ours.
• Always install the current version from the install page. Reinstalling is safe; your library, memory, and settings are kept.

2. Your first hour

1. Open a project and lock the view you want BIM Monkey to read. It works from the active view, so lock it before you ask about it.
2. Open Banana Chat from the BIM Monkey ribbon tab and type ping. You should get a reply within a few seconds.
3. In the web app, upload two or three of your firm’s completed, permit-ready sets. Not redlined sets, not work in progress. This is what teaches it your standards.
4. On the Standards page, click Synthesize. Until you do, Banana Chat has no firm context to work from.
5. Back in Revit, ask it to audit your template against your standards. That first audit is the fastest way to see what it knows and what it doesn’t.

3. How to talk to it

• Go step by step. Asking it to build a whole power and lighting plan from an old set in one shot will stall somewhere you can’t see. Ask for one thing, check it, ask for the next. “Place receptacles in this room per NEC spacing” works. “Do the electrical plan” doesn’t.
• Type project specifics into the chat. Scope of work, address, title-block dates, what the client contracted for. The library gives it your firm’s habits; the chat gives it this project. Dropping in the client contract or the zoning feasibility report is a good first message, and it will keep the scope text on your sheets in step with changes later.
• Use element IDs. Select something in Revit, read the ID from the Manage tab, and paste it. “Change wall 4766954 to the face-brick type” is unambiguous.
• Ask for the plan first. “List the next six steps to turn this project into a clean template” costs almost nothing and tells you whether it understood.
• Start a new chat for a new task. Context from an earlier test carries over and will color a fresh test. Reset when you want a clean answer.

4. What it’s good at, and what costs patience

It is strongest at reading, tagging, checking, and annotating what already exists in the model, and at building the supporting pieces around your work: types, families, sheets, views, cleanup. It can model geometry, but that takes patience and tokens. One of our own massing studies, a small multi-unit development with topography, floor plates, walls, and driveways, took over an hour and about twenty dollars. If you have a choice, model the geometry yourself and let it do everything around the geometry.

5. Workflows that have paid off

• Cover sheet from the survey PDF. Scope, address, parcel, zoning, and the surveyor’s name read off the title block image.
• Cross-check the sheet against the model. “Do the FAR and lot-coverage numbers on A1.01 match the area schedule?” On one project this caught three stale figures typed on a sheet that no longer matched the geometry. That is the kind of thing that bounces a permit.
• Pull sheets from a past project. It can open a reference file alongside the live model and copy the actual notes over, then remember the corrected version so the next project gets it right the first time.
• Batch sheet metadata. “Set the issue date on every sheet to 09/17/26 and tell me which ones changed.” Twenty-two sheets, one pass.
• Door and window types from PDF notes. Sill heights and sizes listed as notes on an existing set, turned into types. You still place them.
• A custom family from a description and a photo. A puck sconce built while the architect worked on something else. Center point adjusted by hand afterward.
• Splitting a wall type to fix joins. One combined wall became a stud wall and a face-brick wall, selected by ID and retyped.
• Sections at intervals, then onto sheets. “Cut building sections every 20 feet” followed by “place those on sheets.”
• Reflected ceiling plan crosshairs. Center marks in every room, grouped and named.
• Occupancy analysis on commercial work. Assembly versus business versus mercantile, and what changes if the classification changes.
• Feasibility check. Drop a single-family feasibility PDF in and ask whether it fits the zoning envelope. It does the math.
• Room tags, unit conversion, translation. Add rooms and tags, report areas in square meters, or rename rooms in another language.
• Second QA pass before permit. Drop your printed submittal PDF back into the chat and ask what looks wrong. It catches duplicate sheet titles and placeholder text you’ve stopped seeing.
• Code references. Ask it to verify the building and zoning code references on your sheets against current sources.

More, in the same format, on the Use cases page.

6. Scripts and the wrench

• When a fix works, say “save that as a script for the team.” Scripts run from the ribbon at zero token cost. Audits and purges you repeat on every project belong here.
• The wrench button lets it watch what you do by hand in Revit and learn the pattern.
• Sheets it creates carry an asterisk in the name. Remove the asterisk before you print a permit set.
• Example scripts worth building early: a line-style cleanup against your standards, a text-standards builder, and a floor plan to CAD linework converter in a drafting view.

7. What it costs

• Revit chat bills your Anthropic key. Tagging, auditing, and sheet work are cheap. Geometry and long exploratory sessions are not. A full-time daily user’s month runs around $250. When you think about it, that’s cheap for a Revit assistant.
• Web app usage, uploads, synthesis, and web chat are included in your subscription.
• Long conversations get more expensive as they grow. Starting a new chat per task keeps each one cheap.

8. Close every session the same way

Ask it to summarize what worked and what didn’t, paste that into a running document, and send it to us. That log is how we fix what didn’t work and how you build a record of what your firm has taught it. A real one looks like this:

If you see “Connection dropped, retrying” in the status line, wait. If a message ends in a red error, resend it. Your Revit changes up to that point are already saved.

9. Getting help

Email [email protected] with the session summary and, if something failed, the log folder at %APPDATA%\Autodesk\Revit\Addins\<your Revit year>\Logs. We offer a screen-share during your first two weeks.