What is bim?

bim is a program your AI assistant runs on your Windows PC to do real work in your apps and files. Here's what that means in practice.

The problem it solves

Your AI assistant — the one you use in a chat window or inside your editor — is good at understanding what you want. It's not so good at actually doing it inside Revit, or Excel, or a PDF viewer, because those programs aren't accessible to it directly. It can write you a script. It can explain a workflow. But it can't pull a flood zone from a government database and put it on your title block, or bulk-set a parameter across 400 elements, or shrink a 100-sheet PDF set before you send it to a client — not without something local to run the commands on your machine.

bim is that something.

How it works

bim is a small program that lives at %LOCALAPPDATA%\bim-cli\ on your Windows machine. It speaks to your apps through drivers — one per format:

• bim-revit communicates with a running Revit session over a local connection
• bim-pdf reads and processes PDFs without opening them
• bim-excel reads and writes Excel files without opening Excel
• bim-site queries public government APIs for site data (flood, zoning, elevation, and more)
• bim-google reads and writes Google Sheets and Docs via your existing sign-in
• bim-image converts, annotates, and inspects image files
• bim-rhino communicates with a running Rhino session

Your AI assistant calls these drivers with a simple command syntax: bim revit status, bim site flood lookup --address "...", bim excel write report.xlsx. It reads the JSON result, decides what to do next, and reports back to you.

What "per-user install" means

When your assistant runs the install script, it downloads bim to your own user folder — not a system folder, not Program Files. No administrator password is required. No one else on the machine is affected. If you want to remove it, one command cleans everything up.

After install, bim makes no network calls unless you specifically ask it to (a flood zone lookup, a Sheets push). Your Revit files, your PDFs, your spreadsheets stay on your machine.

What you actually do

In most cases: nothing technical. You describe a task to your AI assistant — in plain language, in a chat window — and it figures out which bim commands to run. You don't see the terminal. You don't write the commands. You get a result.

If you do want to run bim yourself — from PowerShell, from a script — it works exactly the same way. The commands are the same whether a person or an AI is running them.

Who it's for

Anyone who works with Revit, PDFs, or spreadsheets and has started using an AI assistant. The person sitting next to someone who "does the Excel stuff" and wishes they didn't have to wait. The project architect who wants the flood zone on the title block before the submission deadline, not after. The BIM coordinator who runs the same parameter audit every Monday morning.

You don't need to know what a CLI is. You just need an AI assistant that can run shell commands.

Design principles

These are the five commitments that shape how bim is built and how it behaves.

1. Agent-first — the primary user is an AI agent; it self-discovers, self-installs, and self-operates. The human is the beneficiary, not the operator.
2. Format-pluggable — the dispatcher knows nothing about formats. A format is a binary. Adding capability means dropping a file, never changing the core.
3. Offline, zero-setup — no cloud, no admin, no accounts. Everything runs on the machine it was installed on.
4. Quiet and safe — dry-run on every destructive verb, NDJSON for long ops, errors blame the situation never the user. Quiet when working, clear when not.
5. No surprises — every verb is discoverable from bim describe --json. Output is always parseable. Errors tell you what happened and what to do next. Behavior doesn't change based on hidden state.