MARCO — an agent in road design
An AI setup doing real civil-engineering work inside the design software.
MARCO is an AI setup that does production civil-engineering work: reading the real source of truth out of design files and turning each fix into a reusable skill. This series follows it case by case — what it placed, where the real data lived, and the lesson that generalises beyond road design.
- 01 Give the agent the real source of truth
An AI setup I call MARCO placed 26 drainage culverts into our road-design software from a one-column list. The speed wasn't the interesting part. What mattered was finding which file held the real toe of the slope, and turning the fix into a reusable skill.
What's next
The series continues as the work does.
- Reading road markings back from the model — Recovering horizontal signage the design software already knows about.
- The slope-comb — Combing batter slopes across a corridor without hand-editing each section.