One mind. Eight arms.
The livingengineering document.
The Workbook holds the numbers; the Document holds the narrative. Change a cell and the sentence changes with it — units carried, provenance kept, nothing stale.
§ 4.1 · Report
For the pad footing under column C3, the applied bearing pressure is 173.6 kPa, giving a utilisation of 0.69 against the allowable bearing of 250 kPa.
Workbook · bearing
Why OctoMeta exists
The calc you stampedisn't the calc you have.
Every engineer knows the Monday: the span changed on Friday, the spreadsheet was updated, the Word report wasn't. Two artifacts. Two different truths. One signature: yours.
Logic you can't review.
That formula is load distribution across a six-pile group, but nothing on screen says so. Cell references hide engineering intent, so checking means reverse-engineering. And on most projects, that means it doesn't happen.
sheet updated 12 Nov
Deliverables that rot.
The PDF was true the day it was printed. Four days later the founding level changed and the report didn't. Now the stale copy carries your stamp while the truth lives in the sheet it was copied from, and nobody is sure which numbers were checked.
Units on the honour system.
Spreadsheets will add anything to anything. A kip that should have been a kilonewton survives every review that doesn't recompute by hand: the exact class of silent error behind some of the industry's most expensive failures.
~40%
of engineering time spent finding, rebuilding and reconciling calculations (industry estimates)
~24%
of computational notebooks re-executed without error in the largest study to date; order and hidden state defeat the rest
up to 7%
of contract value on large projects attributed to calculation errors (industry estimates)
Every copy is maintained by hand. OctoMeta removes the copies: the numbers live in one place, so nothing to reconcile and nothing to go stale.
Reactive by construction
Edit once.The report follows.
A Document links the Workbooks that compute it, and the values in its prose read straight from their cells. When a number changes, every sentence carrying it is already right — the reconciling week disappears.
Your calculation isn't transcribed into a deliverable. It is one.
Names, not coordinates
Publish the valuenot the cell reference.
A Workbook publishes a cell as a named value — a name, a description, a unit where the number has one. Write that name into a sentence and the sentence carries the live number, read-only.
The name is a label, not an address. Rename the value, move its cell, insert rows above it — the sentence follows, because it points at the value's identity, not at where it sat.
Delete the cell and the value goes unbound: plainly empty, never quietly holding the last number it saw. Impossible to sign off by accident.
Published attribute
unit · kPa
In the document
…the applied bearing pressure is 173.6 kPa, giving a utilisation of 0.69…
One published attribute, four events. Renames and moves pass underneath it; only losing the cell shows.
Built for checking
Reviewable by design.
Provenance on hover and one click back to the source cell make checking fast and trustworthy: a workflow made for ISO 19650-style checking, not bolted on after.
Hover a value in the document to see who computes it, which Workbook and cell it comes from, and the unit it carries. Select it and the source cell is one click away.
Every number carries its unit when it has one. The unit is part of the published value's contract: attached at the source, displayed with the value, and carried wherever that value appears.
§ 4.1 · Bearing check
…the applied bearing pressure is 173.6 kPa, giving a utilisation of 0.69.
Workbook · bearing
cell D4q_b
= P / B²
unit · kPacontract metadata
Hover or focus the value to inspect its provenance. Activate it to follow the path back to Workbook · bearing, cell D4.
Coming soon · Your tools via MCP
Connected to the toolsyou already run.
The numbers you need already exist: in Revit models on Autodesk Construction Cloud, and in the ERP that holds your rates. Planned MCP connectors will bring those values into OctoMeta instead of asking you to retype them.
Read-only first. The first planned connectors will read Revit and ACC data via Autodesk Platform Services, alongside ERP unit rates exposed through MCP. They will not write changes back to source systems.
A bound property or rate is intended to arrive with its source and unit attached, like any other input — ready to use without losing where it came from.
Roadmap preview · not available today
A roadmap illustration, not a live connector. The planned first step is read-only: Revit and ACC properties via APS, and ERP rates via MCP.
Early access
Test the platform first.
We're onboarding a small group of structural and civil teams. Bring a real calc package; leave with a living document that recalculates, carries its provenance, and stays in one place.
- Private beta is free; we ask only for honest feedback on real work.
- Founding Engineer pricing locked for beta users who continue.
- One email when your invite is ready. Nothing else.