Proof · run in full · check it yourself
Three lines on this pay application will not be paid. Here is each one, and the rule it broke.
$118,640 of a $256,010 billing, caught before the packet went out. Every finding below shows two quotes side by side — one from the packet, one from the specification — both with page numbers.
The specification is free and public. You can download it in one command and check every quote on this page. That is the point of using it.
What you are looking at
The packet is synthetic. We wrote it. A mechanical subcontractor billing its prime on a USACE job, Application No. 7. There is no Fenwick Mechanical, no Building 4410, and no client — this practice has none, and inventing one would be the same class of error as inventing a citation. Every figure in it is ours, and it reconciles.
The rules are not ours. They come from UFGS 01 33 00 SUBMITTAL PROCEDURES (August 2018, Change 4 – 02/21), the submittal specification USACE, NAVFAC and AFCEC issue free to the public, plus one FAR clause and two Davis-Bacon sections. Every quote was fetched from its source, converted to text and read directly — not recalled, not summarised.
The findings are a real run, transcribed from an execution of the downloadable pack on 4 August 2026. The pack ships with this same packet, so you can reproduce them rather than trust them.
The findings
Eighteen assertions ran. Three of them cost money.
Ordered the way the check runs them: the expensive failure before the cosmetic one.
Line 06 · Hydronic piping, mains · $57,840 this period — there is no submittal register row for it.
From the packet
Continuation sheet, p.2
“06 Hydronic piping - mains 23 21 13 578,400.00 404,880.00 57,840.00”
From the rule
UFGS 01 33 00 ¶1.9.1, p.23
“Prepare and maintain a submittal register, as the work progresses.”
Section 23 21 13 is billed on the continuation sheet and appears nowhere in the register. And the register export closes the obvious escape route on its own face — p.3: “This export is not filtered: every Division 22 and 23 row on the register appears below.” So “the filter hid it” is not available. Either the section was never registered, or the export’s own completeness statement is wrong. Nothing in this packet establishes the line is payable, and the check says exactly that rather than picking one.
Line 12 · VAV terminal units, stored on site · $42,300 — the governing submittal is coded RR, disapproved.
From the packet
Submittal register, p.3
“23 36 00-01 23 36 00 VAV terminal units G RR 17 Jul 2026”
From the rule
UFGS 01 33 00 ¶1.12.1(c), p.33
“Submittals marked ‘not approved,’ ‘disapproved,’ or ‘revise and resubmit’ … Do not proceed with work for this item until the resubmittal is approved.”
The submittal came back disapproved on 17 July. The units were delivered on 20 July — three days later — and billed as stored material on this application.
The part we could have overstated, and did not
The obvious move here is to quote ¶1.16 and call it a prohibition. Read what ¶1.16 actually says, p.34:
“Payment for materials incorporated in the work will not be made if required approvals have not been obtained.”
These units are stored. The packet says so — p.2: “delivered to the project site 20 July 2026 and stored in the Building 4410 loading dock. Not installed.” They are not incorporated in the work, so ¶1.16 does not, on its own words, bar billing them today. What is true is the forward chain: they cannot lawfully be installed until the resubmittal is approved (¶1.12.1(c) and ¶1.13, p.33), and the moment they are, ¶1.16 bars payment for them. The $42,300 is money advanced against an item that cannot be built yet. That is the accurate claim, and it is narrower than the one we wanted to make.
Line 07 · Ductwork, Level 1 · $18,500 — billed behind RA, which is not approval.
From the packet
Submittal register, p.3
“23 31 00-02 23 31 00 Ductwork, Level 1 shop dwgs G RA 02 Jul 2026”
From the rule
UFGS 01 33 00 ¶1.12.1(e), p.33
“Submittals marked ‘receipt acknowledged’ indicate that submittals have been received by the Government. This applies only to ‘information-only submittals’ as previously defined.”
The register puts G in the classification column on that row, and ¶1.9.6.2 on p.26 defines G in one phrase — a cell in the code table, wrapping across two printed lines:
“Submittal requires Government Approval”
Said precisely, because it matters if you go looking: that is a table cell, not a sentence in running prose. If you extract the PDF to plain text the columns interleave and the phrase will not appear as one contiguous string — it reads “G Submittal requires G GA” on one line and “Government Approval” on the next. Open p.26 and look at the table.
A submittal that requires Government approval is not an information-only submittal, so RA cannot properly sit on this row — and RA is in no case one of the notations ¶1.12.1(a) or (b) says authorises proceeding with the work. This is the finding that is easiest to miss by hand, because RA looks like an acknowledgement rather than a refusal, and it sits on the register between two rows that both read A.
Ten checks passed and found nothing — open them
These are not filler. A check that reports nothing is worthless unless you can tell it apart from a check that never ran, which is why the agent always emits the count first: 18 assertions run — 9 passed, 6 findings, 3 unchecked. Three of the six findings are the ones above; the other three are a roll-up of the action codes, the stored-material support that p.2 says is attached and p.4 records as missing, and six days of the billing period falling in a payroll week the index does not account for.
What we could not check
Three of the eighteen came back UNCHECKED.
Published at the same weight as the findings, because a check that never says “I could not establish this” is a check you cannot trust when it says anything else. Each one names the document that would settle it.
Line 11 · $33,740 · the AN code
Submittal 23 09 00-01 is coded AN. ¶1.12.1(b), p.33, authorises proceeding “provided that the Contractor takes no exception to the corrections.” A submittal register records the code. It does not record whether an exception was taken, and no amount of reading this packet will produce that fact.
Settled by: The returned submittal 23 09 00-01 as marked by the Government, or the correspondence answering it.
The retainage rate, and the $9,640 on the bond line
The arithmetic is right — that is a pass. Whether 10% is the correct rate, and whether retainage may be taken against the $96,400 bonds-and-insurance line at all, are subcontract questions. On a prime’s request to the Government, FAR 52.232-5(g) is explicit: “The retainage provisions in paragraph (e) above shall not apply to that portion of progress payments attributable to bond premiums.” That clause runs between the prime and the Government. Whether anything like it reaches a subcontractor depends on the subcontract, and we have not read it. So: the arithmetic is reported, the clause is named, and the entitlement is unverified.
Settled by: The payment articles of the executed subcontract.
Continuity with the previous application
The period is stated — 1 to 31 July. Whether it follows Application No. 6 without a gap or an overlap cannot be established, because Application No. 6 is not in the packet. The dollar figure on line 7 is a dollar figure, not a date, and it does not settle the question.
Settled by: Application No. 6 as certified by the prime.
The relationship worth noticing: every UNCHECKED line above disappears the moment a document is added to the folder. Give the check your subcontract and the retainage question resolves. Give it your project’s tailored 01 33 00 and the paragraph-numbering caveat resolves. That relationship is the entire product — a Blueprint is the exercise of working out which documents make which questions answerable, for one workflow, at your shop.
Do not take our word for any of it
Download this as a runnable pack and get the same findings yourself.
A folder you drop into your own Claude account. It contains the same synthetic packet, the specification quoted with page numbers, the eighteen assertions in order, the system prompt in full, and a README written for someone who has never opened a terminal. Say “run the check” and it produces the findings above.
- It needs no key from us, no account with us, and no permission from us. If we vanished tomorrow it would still work.
- We cannot see your run. Nothing in the folder phones home. That is not a privacy policy — it is the absence of any code that could.
- It ships with a checksum for the exact specification PDF we read, and the page numbers to turn to. Check the quotes.
- It ships with the expected output, so you can grade it — including the three UNCHECKED items, which a run that reports none of has guessed.
ZIP, about 23 KB, twelve files, no installer. Requires a Claude account of your own.
Not yet recorded
A four-minute screen capture of the pack being installed in a normal Claude account and catching the RR-coded line will live here. It does not exist yet, so there is no player above this line — an empty frame promising a video is the kind of thing this page exists not to do. If you would rather watch it than run it, say so and it moves up the list.
How the citations on this page were checked
Fetched, converted, and read — not recalled.
The specification PDF was downloaded from the Whole Building Design Guide, checksummed, converted to text, and the paragraphs read directly at the page numbers printed in the footers. FAR 52.232-5 and the two Davis-Bacon sections were pulled from the eCFR the same way and read in full rather than summarised. The checksum ships in the pack so you can confirm you have the same file.
Two things were dropped rather than softened. A page reference we had been given for ¶1.16 was wrong — the paragraph is on p.34, and the page number printed here is the one read off the document. And the pack originally cited two Davis-Bacon rules whose text it did not carry; the check correctly refused to quote them, so the text was added rather than the citation kept on trust. If any citation on this page is wrong, we want to know — support@physislabs.ai.
This is one workflow, checked against public rules.
Yours would be checked against your subcontract, your GC’s portal rules and your last five kick-backs — the documents that turned three of the eighteen assertions above into UNCHECKED. That is a Workflow Blueprint: $750, one workflow, five business days from complete materials. The worked sample is free and complete, including the prompt.