opentakeoff
Open-source (AGPL-3.0) PDF takeoff for construction & flooring — the first engine an AI agent drives natively over MCP, not bolted on. Rooms measured on the wall faces, symbol sweeps, materials + quantities with full provenance, built for preconstruction. Runs entirely in your browser.
Install / Use
claude mcp add Kentucky-ai -- npx -y github:Kentucky-ai/opentakeoffIf the server publishes to npm under a different name, use that package instead — check the repo README.
MCP Server
Model Context Protocol server
Quality Score
Category
Development & EngineeringSupported Platforms
Our assessment of opentakeoff
opentakeoff scores 83/100 on our quality scale, 3042nd of 4,597 Development & Engineering skills we index.
Its MCP Server is 56 KB long, well organised into 36 sections with 4 code examples: long enough that it reads more like full documentation than a focused instruction file, which agents can find harder to follow.
It has 517 GitHub stars, a meaningful sign that others use it.
Maintenance, license and trust
- The repository was last updated 2 days ago, so opentakeoff is actively maintained.
- It is released under AGPL-3.0, a copyleft license: you can use it, but modified versions you distribute must carry the same license.
- Its trust signals score 100/100, with no cautions. These come from repository metadata, not a code audit — read the skill file before letting an agent act on it.
opentakeoff compared with similar skills
All 4 of these similar skills score higher than opentakeoff; compare them before choosing.
| Skill | Score | Stars | Updated | Format |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| opentakeoff (this skill)by Kentucky-ai | 83 | 517 | 2d ago | MCP Server |
| Agent-Reachby Panniantong | 100 | 96.8k | 5d ago | CLAUDE.md |
| headroomby headroomlabs-ai | 100 | 75.2k | today | CLAUDE.md |
| CowAgentby zhayujie | 100 | 47.4k | today | CLAUDE.md |
| ai-job-searchby MadsLorentzen | 100 | 46.5k | 4d ago | CLAUDE.md |
Frequently asked questions
- How do I install opentakeoff?
- Run
claude mcp add Kentucky-ai -- npx -y github:Kentucky-ai/opentakeoff. The install tabs above show the steps for each supported agent. - Which AI agents does opentakeoff work with?
- It is written for Claude Code and Claude Desktop, as a MCP Server file. Other agents that read the same format can often use it too.
- Is opentakeoff safe to use?
- It is AGPL-3.0-licensed and scores 100/100 on trust signals. Skills are instructions an agent will follow, so read the file before installing it and do not approve commands you do not understand.
- Is opentakeoff still maintained?
- The repository was last updated 2 days ago, so opentakeoff is actively maintained.
Skill content
View source on GitHubOpenTakeoff
The measurement engine for building plans—built so an AI agent can drive it, and so an estimator wants to.
A takeoff is the act of measuring quantities off a construction drawing. OpenTakeoff does it two ways over one engine: <!--tool-count-->53<!--/tool-count--> MCP tools for an agent, and a browser canvas for a person. Agents and people share the takeoff document and quantity calculations. Each sheet carries its calibration; measurements carry geometry, method and authorship. Recalibration updates quantities together, incompatible imports report scale conflicts, and agent measurements carry an explicit review status. See the Phase 1 test guide.
For agents · Try the canvas · The engine's contract · For the person at the canvas · The data layer · Research · Fork it · Contribute
The two manuals: agent manual · user manual
Protocol work: Takeoff Protocol draft and compatibility status—formalizing existing records; current takeoff behavior is unchanged.
Read this in: 日本語 · 한국어 · 简体中文
Watch it: an autonomous agent runs a takeoff, live, no cuts (2:47) · hospital finish plan → report in about a minute (1:14) · canvas walkthrough (1:10) · One-Click Area (0:51)
<br/> <img src="docs/img/social-card.png" alt="OpenTakeoff — a real takeoff on a floor finish plan, driven the same way by a person or by an AI agent over MCP, with the scale and origin of every measurement" width="820"/> </div>One-Click Area is temporarily gated. The flood engine is being re-validated against a wider plan corpus. Until that finishes the One-Click tool is off the canvas rail (
Oreports the gate) and theone_click/detect_roomsMCP verbs are not registered (a default build ships <!--tool-count-->53<!--/tool-count--> tools). Trace rooms with Area (A) in the canvas andmeasure_polygonover MCP; every other tool, sweep and derivation is unchanged. A build lifts the gate withVITE_ONE_CLICK=1(canvas) /OPENTAKEOFF_ONE_CLICK=1(server). Sections and videos below that show One-Click describe the engine as it returns — seedocs/design/ONE_CLICK_GATE.md.
The Premium workspace offers compact controls, searchable actions and sheets, personal panel arrangements, adjustable surfaces and larger sheet previews. It is the default when this browser has no saved layout choice; Classic layout remains available. See the workspace design and research.
Sheet navigation releases closed PDFs and embedded fonts from the tile workers; see the 30-flip rendering check. Beyond the PDFs in open tabs, at most four idle PDFs stay loaded (two on a phone or tablet, or a browser that reports 4 GB of memory or less), least recently used out first; see the 12-PDF check.
Start here
| You are | Go here |
|---|---|
| An estimator with a bid due | Open the canvas—drag in a plan, no account, nothing uploads. The user manual gets you from a blank tab to an exported takeoff in five minutes, and its working order is the sequence to run on a real bid set. |
| An AI agent—or the person wiring one up | npx -y opentakeoff-mcp, then the agent manual: the operating model, the standard finish every takeoff ends with, what the engine refuses to guess, and why. Tool-by-tool reference is mcp/README.md. |
| A developer building on the engine | AGENTS.md is the repo map and the ship discipline; FEATURES.md maps every capability to the code that does it. |
| A crew that wants its own copy | Fork it—your own instance on your own URL in a few minutes, AGPL-3.0, nothing phones home. Same path if you're going to send a pull request. |
Windows, macOS, Linux — all of it
OpenTakeoff is a client-only browser app, so the canvas runs the same on Windows, macOS, ChromeOS and Linux in any current Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Safari. Nothing installs, nothing uploads, and no feature is gated on an operating system.
- Shortcuts are platform-aware. The app labels modifiers for the keyboard in front of you —
Ctrl/Alt/Shifton Windows and Linux,⌘/⌥/⇧on a Mac — and the handlers have always treated⌘andCtrlas the same key. Press?in the canvas for the current list. - The MCP server is tested on Windows.
npx -y opentakeoff-mcpruns on Windows, macOS and Linux, and CI runs the full MCP suite — typecheck, tests, build and the packaged smoke test — onwindows-latestas well asubuntu-lateston every change. - Optional extras. The bundled capture server is stdlib Python 3 and runs anywhere
Python does — on Windows invoke it with
python capture\capture_server.py selftest(or thepylauncher) rather thanpython3. Neither it nor the optionalserver/AI sandbox is needed to use the canvas. - Locked-down enterprise fleets (MSIX packaging, Windows Sandbox, Intune silent deploy) are tracked in #226 and not yet built.
What this is
Measuring quantities off a plan is the input to every construction bid—how much floor, how much wall, how many fixtures, at what scale, on which sheet. It happens thousands of times a day. Until OpenTakeoff there was no open-source takeoff engine at all, web-based or otherwise, and nothing an autonomous agent could call.
OpenTakeoff is that engine, with two front ends sharing geometry and quantity modules:
- Review cleanup—agents can edit annotation text with undo while preserving geometry and review; RFI-linked notes require browser review. Scope warnings distinguish numeric edge residue from real small overlaps.
- A stdio MCP server—
npx -y opentakeoff-mcp, <!--tool-count-->53<!--/tool-count--> tools, on the official MCP registry. An agent opens a plan, reads the title block, sets the scale, traces the rooms to their wall faces (the flood engine stays gated), checks its own work on a rendered overlay, and hands back a marked-up planset PDF. - A browser canvas—no backend, no account, no upload. An estimator drags in a plan set and traces it, using One-Click room detection, CAD hatches, roll-goods seam layout, a materials buy list, and exports.
Neither is a wrapper around the other. The MCP server imports shared web modules, so quantity math and takeoff records are compatible. Browser and MCP room-detection paths currently differ; shared code does not guarantee identical boundaries on every plan. One-Click remains gated while that boundary is re-validated.
Provenance is the load-bearing part. Every shape records the scale it was measured at, the method that produced it (vector flood, raster trace, hand-drawn, agent-proposed), whether a human corrected it, and the machine's original boundary frozen beside the correction. This includes agent shapes drawn with manual measurement tools; the actor and drawing method are separate fields. Downstream, that's an audit trail a PM can read. Upstream, it's a labeled (geometry → finish) pair—the training signal takeoff models have never had at scale. That second use is not a side effect; see the data layer.
Recently shipped
- Tracing rules an agent actually reads—the room-boundary conventions an estimator uses
(innermost wall face, door openings crossed on the wall centerline, columns and chases wrapped,
never a hatch edge or a door leaf, a tight overlay check per ring) now ship inside the server:
takeoff://wiki/workflows, the initialize instructions and themeasure_polygondescription. On a task with no conventions in it, one unprompted run went from 0 of 6 rooms with door notches to 6 of 6 (#423, MCP 0.9.84) - A plan set with reference rings, and blind runs against it—three public floor plans (a VA
healthcare finish plan, a VA clinic floor plan, a city public-domain ADU) with estimator-trace
references, a scorer profile for concave rooms and finish splits, and published blind agent
runs with frozen exports, scores and overlays. The runs found defects in the references first;
the references are v2 and still unreviewed by a person, and the open estimator questions are
listed (#421,
#422,
evals/mcp-workflow-bench/plan-set/) - The human review loop, start to finish—import an agent's takeoff, correct a ring, accept the batch, export, and reopen the archive on a clean machine with geometry and review state intact, with screenshots of the real app in the user manual (#424)
- The Takeoff Protocol draft, one shared wiki, and a scripted workflow benchmark—the existing record fields inventoried and formalized as draft schemas with an executable compatibility matrix (10 conform, 1 needs an adapter, 5 unsupported and named); one wiki for people and agents, packaged as MCP resources and checked against source in CI; and a workflow benchmark that drives the built server flat and staged, scores geometry separately from totals, and reopens the export in a fresh process (#406–#419, roadmap)
- Stitched sheets—a floor split across a match line becomes one working surface; a room that crosses the seam traces as one shape, One-Click included (#161)
- PDF layer roles—CAD-exported sheets state what their ink is, so One-Click reads the layer tree instead of inferring boundaries from hatch, with a Layers panel on the canvas and scored corpus IoU (#85)
- The sheet graph—an agent asks "what finish is in room 134, and how do you know" and gets the schedule row with a citation per cell, across continuation sheets, rotated headers, and mul
Truncated for display — read the full file on GitHub.
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Trust signals
From repository metadata: license, adoption, age and documentation. Not a code audit — see the Safety scan above for what the skill file itself contains.
