Deep-dive

Take a closer look at what went into delivering this solution.

Discovery

Early conversations with architects, security consultants, and compliance officers revealed a shared pain point: validating detailed building specifications against security standards was a repetitive and manual process. Documents varied in format and quality, standards evolved over time, and the level of analysis required to ensure regulatory approval was often too complex to handle without specialist expertise.

Stakeholders expressed a desire for:

• Clause-level feedback

• Support for both built-in and custom standards

• Clear reporting with actionable insights

• AI assistance, but without losing transparency or traceability

These insights informed the initial design of SpecCheck as an AI-augmented tool with explainability at its core.

Challenges

1. Parsing Real-World Documents

   Specification documents are notoriously unstructured, mixing formatting styles, headings, and non-standard language. Extracting meaningful clauses or mapping them against compliance rules required robust parsing logic with support for PDFs, DOCX, and varying formats.

2. AI Token Limitations & Reasoning Clarity

   Standard LLM APIs often struggled with large context windows and returning reliable clause-level outputs. GPT-4o was selected for its enhanced token window (19,000+ tokens) and improved reasoning, but we still had to build chunking and reassembly strategies to maintain logical integrity and readable explanations.

3. Custom Standards Support

   Allowing users to upload their own standards meant building a clause extraction pipeline that could reliably identify, structure, and store unique sets of compliance rules without manual preprocessing. This required AI-powered clause detection, confidence scoring, and error handling across arbitrary documents.

4. Real-Time UX & Secure Access

   We needed an interface that was simple enough for first-time users but detailed enough for professional auditors. Building real-time progress indicators, secure PIN-based access, and a robust frontend around asynchronous API services involved syncing multiple Docker containers while preserving session security and performance.

Use of AI

AI is central to SpecCheck’s value proposition:

• Standard Parser Agent: Parses DOCX/PDF standards into structured, queryable clauses using GPT-4o with markdown-safe reasoning.

• Spec Validator Agent: Compares user-uploaded specifications against any standard, producing clause-by-clause compliance insights with justifications, recommendations, and confidence scores.

• Context-Aware Compliance: GPT-4o enables analysis of large, complex documents that would overwhelm traditional models, with context preservation techniques ensuring AI outputs are grounded and interpretable.

• Vector Search (ChromaDB): Embedded clause representations enable similarity checks and semantic matching between specification content and standard language.

• Explainability: Unlike black-box compliance checkers, SpecCheck surfaces why a clause passed or failed, with traceable logic and AI explanations visible to the user.