Benny

Public work is steady work, and most small builders and trades never bid for it. A council tender pack runs to a hundred pages or more across a dozen files: conditions, scope, specifications, drawings, response schedules and declarations, each with its own rules about format, page limits and what must be attached. Big contractors have bid writers. A forty-person builder has the owner, at night, on a deadline.

The cost is not only time. One expired insurance certificate or a missed returnable schedule and the bid is non-conforming, however good the price. So the builders who do tender learn to bid less, and the ones who don’t assume public work is not for them. Benny is built to make a well-formed, honest bid the normal outcome, not the heroic one.

The builders I interviewed added a second problem that happens after the win. The bid is full of commitments, a named supervisor, a programme, a quality system, and the handover from the people who won the work to the people who deliver it is where those details go missing. That is why Benny’s job does not end at the result.

Two lines shaped Benny more than any feature. The first is that Benny never declines a tender on the builder’s behalf. It scores fit and says why, “insurance asks for $20m and you hold $10m”, and the builder can override it and have it draft anyway. The second is that Benny never submits. It fills the buyer’s portal right up to the declarations and the Submit button, and stops. Those hard stops, at Submit, at “I declare”, at accepting terms and at paying, live in code, not in a prompt.

Everything in between is Benny’s job, and it is meant to be done without waiting on anyone. Benny asks at most a handful of questions, ranked by what they block, and drafts around nothing it does not know: a gap in the bid is marked as a gap, never filled with something plausible.

Compliance is where bids fail, so it is the screen I spent longest on. Each requirement in the pack becomes a box, filled when it is met, outlined when it needs the builder, and red when something is missing or has expired. The count is the headline, “4 of 11 met”, and the filters jump straight to what needs a person. This one is live: filter it.

Tender portals are built for people, and some of them check that you are one. When a portal throws a picture test or a sign-in code, Benny does not try to solve it. It pauses, tells the builder, and hands over the live browser. The builder clicks through the check in the same window, presses “Hand back to Benny”, and Benny picks up where it stopped. While a person is driving, Benny watches but doesn’t touch anything, and nothing the builder types is kept.

The pipeline mirrors how a professional bid team works, in colour-coded reviews. Benny shreds the pack into requirements, plans the response against the scoring weights, then writes each section using only facts it can cite from the company’s library: past jobs, people, certificates and earlier answers. A lint pass enforces the writing standard, a claim check confirms every statement against its source, and a red team reads the draft as a sceptical evaluator would. The writer and the judge are never the same model.

On the first real public tender packs I tested, from councils in South Australia and Western Australia, the reading caught every trap I had marked by hand, and nineteen in twenty claims in the first drafts were supported by their sources. That gap is exactly what the claim check and the rewrites are there to close.

Benny’s first version is close to done: finding and scoring tenders, reading packs, compliance, writing, tailoring, pricing with or without Eddy, lodging up to Submit, follow-ups and results. The first pilot is a South Australian builder who tenders for council work, and the website is taking a pilot waitlist at getbenny.com.au.

The temptation with an agent like Benny is to make it look busy, a stream of activity that reads as progress. I went the other way. The home screen is a short list of tenders that fit and the one thing that needs you. The tally is a count. Each tailored change gives its reason in one line. A bid writer’s value is judgement, and the interface’s job is to make Benny’s judgement easy to check, not to perform it.

The hard stops taught me the same thing from the other side. Builders can let Benny into a tender portal because it is obvious, in the product and in the code, what it will never do.