name: bid-generator-skill description: Generates client-ready contractor bids that reproduce a specific business's own template and voice exactly, changing only the job-specific content (scope, price, materials, timeline, client info). Use this skill whenever building, adapting, or troubleshooting a bid/proposal generator for a contractor business, whenever the user mentions "bid generator," "proposal generator," extracting a business's bid style, or onboarding a new contractor client for PWS's bid generation offer. Status: Complete (v1).
Bid Generator Skill — Contractor Bid Generation System
Status: Complete (v1)
The items under Design Decisions below are per-client calibration points handled during onboarding, not blockers.
System Overview
This system takes a contractor business's existing bids and a new job's details, and produces a new bid that is visually and structurally identical to their existing template — same layout, headers, formatting, branding — with only the job-specific content swapped in. It is explicitly NOT a plain-text draft the contractor reformats; the output should be the literal, final piece, ready to send.
Two layers:
- Style extraction (done once per contractor business, from sample bids)
— captures both their voice (tone, phrasing, detail density) and their
literal template (layout, section order, formatting, branding). See
references/style-extraction-guide.md. - Bid generation (done per new job) — takes the style/template profile
plus a project intake and produces the finished bid. See
references/generation-workflow.md.
Non-negotiable design decisions (do not deviate without user confirmation)
- Output = final template, not plain text. The contractor's layout, headers, and formatting must be reproduced exactly, every time. Only content fields change per bid.
- Never invent facts. Scope, pricing, materials, and timeline come only from what the user/contractor provides for that specific job. The skill may borrow voice and structure from the style profile, but never fabricates project specifics to fill a gap.
- Contractor accountability, not autopilot. Every generated bid is a
draft pending the contractor's own review and revision before it goes to
a client. This is not something the skill sends on the contractor's
behalf. See
references/review-checkpoint.md. - Legal/warranty language is flagged, not rewritten. See
references/legal-guardrail.md— this is a firm policy, not a style choice. - Versioning uses before/after reference, not rule extraction. See
references/versioning-approach.md.
When Building a New Client's Bid Generator
- Read
references/bid-anatomy-residential-remodeling.mdfirst — it's the researched, industry-standard skeleton of what a complete residential remodeling bid contains (cover page, scope, pricing, timeline, payment schedule, terms/legal section, etc.). Use it as the comparison baseline: where a contractor's real samples match it, that's confirmation; where they diverge, that's a business-voice choice to capture in their profile, not an error to fix. - Read
references/style-extraction-guide.mdand work through it against 2-3+ of the contractor's real sample bids to build their style/template profile. - Read
references/legal-guardrail.mdbefore generating any bid containing warranty, liability, indemnification, licensing/bonding, or payment-dispute language. - Read
references/generation-workflow.mdfor the per-bid intake and generation steps. - Read
references/versioning-approach.mdonce the contractor has sent revised versions of at least one generated bid back — this is how the generator improves over time. - Read
references/review-checkpoint.mdto see how the "pending review" marker should appear on every output.
Delivery Architecture (how the client business actually uses this)
Decided: the contractor never interacts with Claude directly and never has skill/project access. Access to the skill's instructions is the operator's (Marcos's) IP and stays on the operator's account only.
Pipeline: Google Form (private link, feels like the contractor's own
tool) → Zapier → Claude API call using this skill's instructions → finished
proposal delivered back automatically (email or shared Drive folder).
No manual step required from the operator once built. This mirrors the
Form → Zapier → Claude → delivery shape already used in
lead-capture-skill — same pattern, applied to bid generation instead of
lead capture.
This is why recurring revenue holds up: the client is paying for a pipeline they can't see into and don't own, not for a tool they could rebuild themselves.
Future / Not Yet In Scope (v2+)
- Automated materials pricing lookup. A researched idea, deliberately deferred: the contractor submits a plain materials list (item + qty, maybe preferred supplier), an agent looks up current pricing from a specified retailer/supplier site, and the priced results feed directly into the generation step — no manual Sheet-building or re-submission. Real caveats to address when this is scoped: retailer sites vary in how automatable they are, product-matching accuracy isn't guaranteed, and pricing output should be treated as a draft the contractor checks, same as everything else in this system. Do not build until the core generator is working and proven on a real client's actual bids.
Design Decisions & Per-Client Calibration
- Minimum sample bid count — Calibrated per client. Industry research
(
bid-anatomy-residential-remodeling.md) describes the standard shape of a bid but can't tell us how much one contractor's real bids vary from each other. Starting assumption: 2-3 minimum, more if job types vary widely. Confirmed per client from their real samples. - Document format contractors actually use — RESOLVED. Final
client-facing deliverable is overwhelmingly a finished PDF regardless
of drafting tool (Word, Excel-based estimate, or dedicated proposal
software). Still confirm the source template format per client, since
what the generator edits from may differ even when output converges on
PDF. See
bid-anatomy-residential-remodeling.mdfor detail. - Trade-specific adaptation — SEEDED (v2 expansion). This skill's current
research (
bid-anatomy-residential-remodeling.md) is scoped to residential remodeling specifically. Atrade-adaptation-guide.mdfor other trades (roofer, plumber, etc.) is the v2 expansion and follows the same adaptation-guide pattern aslead-capture-skillonce other trades have been researched or onboarded.
Key Principle
Style and template extraction, legal guardrails, versioning, and generation must all stay consistent with each other for a given client business — a change to one (e.g. the contractor corrects their template) should prompt a check of whether the others (e.g. the style profile) need updating too.