How we use Australian Standards

Australian Standards: by name and number only

Australian Standards, including joint AS/NZS standards, are published by Standards Australia, which sells their full text. Standards Australia is not currently accepting licensing requests for digital or AI-powered products. It has told us that we may refer to its standards by name, designation and clause number, and that for anything more we should point you to its official channels for the full text.

So that is all StructBy AI does with them:

• It names standards. A tool may give a standard's title and designation, with its year and amendments where we know them, for example AS 3959:2018.
• It points to sections, clauses, tables and figures by number, with a few words of our own on what to look up there.
• It links to Standards Australia, where you can buy the full text: buy standards from Standards Australia.

No tool is built to reproduce or paraphrase what a standard says. None is written to show you a value, table, factor, distance, class definition or requirement from an Australian Standard, and none works out a result from a standard's tables. Class and rating names, such as a BAL or a wind class, appear only as labels for what you enter. Where a tool needs such a value, it asks you for it, leaves a marked placeholder or reports it as not assessed, and names the standard so you can read it yourself.

CodeLens and the AI-written drafts are a different matter, because their words come from an AI model. The model is instructed never to state or paraphrase a standard, and a model can ignore an instruction. In CodeLens, a sentence that states a number or names a standard the answer cannot trace to our own entries is withheld; in a document draft, numbers with units that the AI wrote are marked for you to confirm. A paraphrase that states no number can still get through. Read every answer and every draft against the standard itself.

Where the site facts come from

The site screening reads published government data, not Australian Standards:

• Wind region: Geoscience Australia's digitised wind region map. It is an interpretation, not for design, so confirm the region against the published figure in the standard.
• Bushfire prone land: the official bushfire prone area map of New South Wales, Victoria, Western Australia, Tasmania and the ACT, where the map covers the site. Elsewhere, bushfire is reported as not assessed.
• Flood: the planning flood controls in Victoria and Tasmania, where the planning maps cover the site. This says whether a flood overlay or zone applies, never whether the site can flood.
• Climate zone: the ABCB's NCC climate zone map.

Anything the maps do not cover, including soil, earthquake hazard and the corrosion environment, is reported as not assessed, with where to get it.

The NCC

CodeLens's NCC entries are our summaries of material the Australian Building Codes Board publishes under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence (CC BY 4.0); they are not the official text. The National Construction Code 2025 was provided by the Australian Building Codes Board under the CC BY 4.0 licence. © Commonwealth of Australia and the States and Territories of Australia 2026. Read the NCC itself at ncc.abcb.gov.au.

Where the NCC calls up an Australian Standard, our entries name it as the NCC does and restate nothing from the standard itself.

What the engineer supplies

Values that come from a standard are yours to determine and enter. In particular:

• The Bushfire Attack Level (BAL) comes from a bushfire assessment by a suitably qualified person. StructBy AI does not calculate one.
• The wind classification of a house, and the site design wind speed of any building, come from your own assessment. StructBy AI does not calculate either.
• Other design values, such as the site classification or the earthquake hazard factor, come from your investigation and your design. Where CodeLens holds soil survey data for a site, it gives the survey figures only, never a site class. A document draft is meant to leave each one you did not enter as a marked placeholder, but the AI can still write a value into the prose and that is not always caught, so read the whole draft.

What StructBy AI does not do

• It makes no finding of compliance. The product never judges whether a design meets a standard or the NCC. If a draft's AI-written text says a design complies and the check detects it, that sentence is reworded or flagged for you; the check matches wording and can miss one, and a certificate draft leaves the declaration for the engineer to write. The judgement stays with the engineer who signs.
• Its screening thresholds are its own. The drawing checker screens only timber depth against span and long steel spans, with rules of thumb that have no recorded source in any standard, and each note says so. It screens no concrete member and no footing.
• It is not a copy of any standard. Check every reference against the current published edition.