Plan check and peer review taught engineers a format that works: a numbered comment, a written response, and the change that response makes. We use the same format here on an agent rollout plan. What follows is illustrative. The firm, the principal and the plan are invented, a composite of the questions we hear from engineering offices.
The setting is a fictional 140-person structural and MEP firm with three offices. Its project team drafted a plan to introduce a Claude drafting agent on calculation package narratives. A principal read the plan the way she reads a set: with a pen, and without sympathy.
Comment 1. Who is the engineer of record on the agent's output?
Principal: The plan says the agent drafts the narrative. A narrative goes out under a stamp. Whose?
Response: The engineer who ran the calculations owns the narrative, same as today. The agent produces a draft, and that engineer reads it, rewrites what is wrong and signs it. Change: section 2 now names the reviewing engineer on every draft, and the agent's output is labeled as a draft until that person accepts it.
Comment 2. Does the agent touch the calculations?
Principal: I do not want a language model near our numbers.
Response: Agreed, and the plan was unclear. The agent receives the engineer's finished calculation output as a file and writes prose around it: scope, assumptions, method, result summary. It does not compute, round or choose a design value, and because a language model can be wrong, every figure in a draft is checked against the source sheet. Change: a short boundary statement now opens the plan, and the checklist includes a figure-by-figure comparison before anything is accepted.
Comment 3. Where do our past narratives come from?
Principal: Our older packages contain choices we no longer make. Do not teach it our bad habits.
Response: Fair. The team will pick three recent packages that the principals consider good, and leave the rest out of the sample set. Retired phrasing goes into a short list of things the agent should not write. Change: the sample-set step now says who selects the packages and who approves the avoid list.
Comment 4. What happens to client documents?
Principal: Some of our clients restrict where their drawings can go.
Response: We do not assume an answer. The office's IT lead goes through the data terms attached to the firm's Claude subscription before any client file is connected, and projects with client restrictions stay out of the first phase until the contract allows it. Change: the first phase is limited to projects whose contracts have been checked, and the list of eligible projects is attached to the plan.
Comment 5. One deliverable, or the whole office?
Principal: The plan lists six document types. That is not a first phase.
Response: It was a wish list. The revised plan covers one deliverable, the calculation package narrative, on one project type, for the first phase. The others wait until that one has been judged by the people who use it. Change: five document types moved to an appendix labeled later, and the scope now fits on a single page.
Comment 6. How will we know it helped?
Principal: I will not accept a feeling.
Response: We will not claim a number we cannot back. The team will keep a plain log of each draft: what the reviewer changed, what they deleted, and what they would not have caught without the draft. After the first phase, the principals read the log and decide. Change: a review log template is attached, and the decision at the end of the first phase is written as a yes, a no, or a revise.
Comment 7. Who can stop it?
Principal: If a junior engineer is uneasy, can they stop using it?
Response: Yes. Staff may set a draft aside and write the page themselves, and nobody needs to explain why. Change: the plan now says so in the rollout section, and the log has a column for drafts that were discarded.
What the principal signed
She signed the revised plan with two conditions: the boundary statement stays on the first page, and the first phase ends with a read-through of the log by all principals together. The agent had no say in either.
If you are drafting your own rollout plan, borrow the shape. Write the comments you expect, answer each one in writing, and record the change it causes. A response with no change attached is usually a promise, and a promise is not a plan.
Agents like this can be built on several AI models, Claude among them, and someone at your firm reads every output before it moves. Bring us one document your office redrafts, and we will help you write the first set of comments to answer.