27 March 2026
Weekly Update 2: The Return of the Real
The resurgence of physical infrastructure, the consulting budget problem, and Chat v2 — a conversational interface that turns words into digital process.
Giraffe works with clients deploying capital in cities around the world. Here's what we're seeing and thinking about.
1. The Return of the Real
The long 1990s feel like they're ending. The unipolar moment — symbolic capital, service-based economies, the sense that history had concluded — is giving way to something more physical. Newspapers now report the number of oil tankers on the high seas, the status of Qatar's LNG plants, the location and MW consumption of semiconductor fabs. Onshoring, sovereign capability, industrial output. Geopolitical crises compounding housing crises compounding climate crises. For the Toozeheads: a polycrisis.
Engineers, broadly, are more at home in the real. They love real things — watts, cross-sectional area, throughput. The physical world is not subject to speculative bubbles, or the hype cycle. An apartment block has a floor plate, a structural grid, a service core, and no amount of financial wizardry changes the underlying matter.
Software has had a more complicated relationship with the real. SaaS, because of its economics, has attracted dreamers — and flirted with unreality. Hype cycles, overinflated promises. In property specifically, productivity has stagnated at the same time that software proliferated. Across sectors more broadly, it is genuinely difficult to assess whether the mass investment in software has been beneficial — or, as Cory Doctorow says, enshittifying.
We try to be realists at Giraffe. Stay as close to the metal as we can. At its core, the thing is a JSON editor on a map with some JavaScript around it. A powerful tool to do real work — difficult and complicated to build and maintain. Our ambition is that it helps people think through difficult real problems and find real solutions.
2. The Consulting Budget Problem
The highly financialised, service-based economy leads to incredible amounts of money flowing around as stuff gets done.
A firm spending $500M on construction, and spending the benchmark 10% on consultants, is spending $50M a year on consultants. That is
10% of that work is already automatable — especially across early-stage design: constraints mapping and analysis, feasibility calculations, scenario testing, solar analyses, document creation, costing reports. 10% saved on
At
Automation is not just buying a product. It involves buying, training, and building custom plugins and scripts — Excel is the clearest picture of this. The industry is currently spending 20 to 1 on consultants versus technology. Consultants are still extremely valuable. But increasing the technology component in the mix is the only prudent option — especially given how quickly the tech is improving.
3. App of the Week: Chat v2
Most SaaS is forms on databases. Giraffe is no different — lots of inputs, lots of structured data, lots of form filling. AI is very good at form filling.
Chat v2 is a chat interface that connects an LLM — currently Claude — directly to Giraffe via a set of skills and tools. A skill is a kind of intuition of when to act. A tool is what to do — basically a function call to the computer. Together they let the model interpret your words and turn them into digital process. Almost the ultimate interface, whilst trying to minimise the necessary cost of hallucination.
In the demo: I dictated instructions — mixed-use development, delete existing usages, create cafe, built-to-rent, built-to-sell, penthouse, community, landscape, set construction costs and sale prices appropriate for Sydney. It runs the tools, asks for approval before deleting anything, and populates the whole model. Colours too bright? Subdued. Add a level to the built-to-rent, remove one from the penthouse? Done. Randomly colour each landscape polygon a different shade of green and place a deciduous tree at the centre of each? It had a go — mostly nailed it.
The financial side is where it gets interesting. Ask it for an NPV assessment against the Sydney market and it pulls web data, fills assumptions, and gives you something to react to. The point isn't that the numbers are perfect. You've now got a digital artefact to start fixing up, very quickly. In the hands of an expert, this is incredible.
There's no magic here. It's an LLM working against tools and guardrails. The good feeling is how quickly it fills data into the model, finds information from the internet and adds it, and then connects diverse toolsets together — conversationally. There's a much smaller gap between expressing a desire and it happening. Like Steve Jobs wanted: a bicycle for the mind.
AI Chat is available only to enterprise customers.