Give your agent a New York City street address. It looks up the lot and its zoning, works out the largest building the district allows, fits a massing that uses the permitted floor area, checks it against the rules, and builds the study in Revit with the neighbourhood around it. You get an 8-sheet PDF, stamped as a feasibility study, with the data attached.

This is an early zoning envelope study, not a design and not a zoning determination. The example below is one real run on bim 0.34.0 with Claude Code and Revit 2026.

Ask your agent

Copy this prompt into your AI coding tool. The site and zoning steps run anywhere bim does; the model and sheets need Revit open on the same PC.

paste into your AI coding tool

Make a zoning envelope and massing feasibility study for <NYC street address>.

Step 1 - install bim-cli if it is not already installed: powershell.exe -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command 'iwr -useb https://bimcli.com/install.ps1 -OutFile $env:TEMP\bim-install.ps1; powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File $env:TEMP\bim-install.ps1'

Step 2 - refresh PATH: pwsh: $env:Path += ";$env:LOCALAPPDATA\bim-cli"

Step 3 - look up the site and save each result: bim site parcel.lookup --address "<address>" --geometry then, with the lot's lat/lon: bim site zoning.lookup, flood.lookup, elevation.lookup --timeout 30s, e-designation.lookup, hurricane-zone.lookup, stormwater-flood.lookup and seismic.lookup, and bim site satellite.map --outline --out satellite.png

Step 4 - from the district's bulk rules in the NYC Zoning Resolution, work out the maximum zoning envelope for the lot and a massing that uses the permitted floor area. If the lot is in a FEMA flood zone, raise the first floor to the design flood elevation. Write the rules you applied as a ruleset, check the massing with bim rules check, and cite the section for every number.

Step 5 - in Revit, use bim revit exec to build the envelope tiers (transparent), the massing storey by storey and the neighbouring buildings from NYC Open Data footprints. Add sun and shadow, view, elevation and section studies, lay out the sheets, then bim revit export-sheets.

Step 6 - stamp the PDF "FEASIBILITY - NOT FOR CONSTRUCTION", attach the data with bim pdf package and open the result in the grid view of bim pdfv open.

Say what you assumed (street widths, shoreline, waterfront status) and what a professional still has to check. Do not present this as a zoning determination.

bim gives the agent the parts: public site data, a rules checker, Revit and the PDF tools. There is no single feasibility command. The zoning arithmetic and the Revit scripts are the agent's own work, written for the district and the lot in front of it, so read its numbers and citations the way you would read a junior colleague's.

1. Look up the site

The parcel lookup returns the lot, its tax block and lot number and, with --geometry, the lot polygon. Every other lookup takes the lot's latitude and longitude.

For 3616 Surf Avenue the lookups returned district R7-3 with a C2-4 overlay, a 27,588 sf lot, FEMA zone AE with a base flood elevation of 10 ft, and ground at about 9.1 ft (USGS). The elevation service can be slow, hence the longer timeout. The FEMA flood zone lookup and the site analysis report explain these layers in more detail.

2. Work out the envelope and the massing

From the district's bulk rules the agent works out the largest building the zoning allows (the envelope) and a massing that fits inside it. In the example the lot sits on a waterfront block, so the heights, tiers and tower limits come from ZR 62-343 rather than the ordinary district tables. The envelope rises in tiers to 375 ft. The massing is a 21-storey tower on a base, 137,938 sf, which is a floor area ratio of 5.00, the district maximum. The first floor is raised to the design flood elevation of 12 ft (base flood elevation plus 2 ft).

The agent writes the rules it applied as a ruleset, with a citation for each, and checks the massing against it:

The same massing with its first floor at grade fails one rule, the lowest-floor requirement in Appendix G of the NYC Building Code:

3. Model it in Revit

bim revit exec runs C# against the open Revit model, one script per step, with its inputs passed as JSON (--args-json @file.json). In the example the agent built the envelope tiers as transparent solids, the massing storey by storey, and 273 neighbouring buildings from NYC Open Data footprints, then the sun and shadow studies, the view analysis, the urban elevations and the site sections. The example sheets use a bim-cli title block; ask the agent to use your office's sheet template instead.

Revit exports the sheets sorted by number, so the agent puts the cover first again with bim pdf page.collect. Running Revit from a terminal is covered in headless Revit; exporting and splitting sheet sets in Revit PDF export. To write the flood zone into a model's parameters instead, see flood zone into Revit.

4. Stamp, package and review

bim pdf package attaches the massing, the envelope and the rules result to the PDF, so whoever receives it can read the numbers as data, not only as drawings. The grid view of bim pdfv open tiles every page so you can check the whole set at a glance.

5. Share it (optional)

With bim's Google driver signed in, the agent can upload the package, add a row to a tracking sheet and leave an email draft for you to read and send yourself: