AI agentsOctober 9, 2026Updated October 10, 20266 min readFloorGen team

Do AI Floor Plan Generators Work? What to Check

An honest look at AI floor plan generators: image models vs real plan engines, the checks every AI plan needs (scale, code, buildability), and FloorGen's AI.

Do AI floor plan generators work? Some do, when what they produce is a real plan: walls with lengths, rooms that close, sizes that add up. Image models produce pictures that look like plans; plan engines produce geometry you can measure, edit and export. Whichever you use, check the scale, the code minimums and whether it can actually be built before you rely on it.

This post explains the difference, gives a checklist for any AI-generated plan, and shows where FloorGen's own AI and its MCP server fit, using an 800 sq ft ADU as the example.

Two kinds of AI floor plan generator

Image generators vs plan engines
	Image generator	Plan engine
Output	A picture (PNG, JPG)	Walls, doors, windows and rooms as data
Scale	None; proportions are drawn, not measured	Built in; every wall has a length
Room areas	Whatever the label says	Computed from the walls
Changing it	A new prompt gives a new picture	Edit the same plan, by hand or by prompt
Code checks	Not possible	Possible, if the tool has them
Export	The image	Scaled PDF, DXF, 3D model, depending on the tool

Image generators are good at mood: a sense of a layout, a style, a presentation look. They are bad at everything a builder needs. Typical faults are rooms whose labels do not match their drawn size, doors that open into walls or into each other, stairs with no landing or too few steps, bathrooms with no room for the fixtures shown, and text that is not quite text. Plan engines can still produce awkward layouts, but their mistakes are measurable and fixable.

What to check in any AI-generated plan

Run these checks on any plan before you show it to a builder, whether an AI drew it or not. Code references are to the 2021 IRC, which most US states adopt with amendments; your local version may differ.

A checklist for AI floor plans (2021 IRC references; check local amendments)
Check	What to look for
Scale	Measure two long walls against the stated overall size. Do the room dimensions add up to the building's size, leaving room for walls?
Areas	Are the stated square feet gross (to the outside) or net (inside the rooms)? On a small house they often differ by 10% or more.
Room minimums	Habitable rooms at least 70 ft² and 7 ft in any horizontal direction (R304)
Ceiling height	Generally at least 7 ft in habitable rooms, halls and baths, with exceptions (R305)
Egress	An emergency escape window or door in every sleeping room and basement (R310)
Hallways	At least 3 ft wide (R311.6)
Stairs	Risers at most 7¾ in, treads at least 10 in, headroom and landings (R311.7)
Bathrooms	Clearances in front of the toilet and beside it; a door that does not hit a fixture
Buildability	Do upper walls stack on lower ones? Are spans reasonable? Do plumbing walls line up? Does the roof work over the footprint?
Site	Setbacks, height and lot coverage are set by local zoning, which no floor plan generator checks

The areas row catches the most common mistake. FloorGen's 800 sq ft 2-bed ADU template is 40 × 20 ft to the outside of its walls, 800 ft², but its rooms add up to 700.5 ft² net: about 12% of the footprint is walls. An AI plan whose room sizes add up to exactly the footprint has no walls in it.

Floor plan of a 40 by 20 foot two-bedroom ADU with bedrooms on the left, a bath, hall and laundry alcove in the middle and an open kitchen, dining and living room on the right, with areas in square feet. — The 800 sq ft ADU template. The room areas add up to 700.5 ft²; the other 100 ft² or so is the walls.

Net room areas of the 800 sq ft ADU template (from FloorGen)
Room	Net area	Check
Bedroom 1	115.7 ft²	Above the 70 ft² IRC minimum
Bedroom 2	93.2 ft²	Above the 70 ft² IRC minimum
Living room	175.4 ft²
Dining	112.7 ft²
Kitchen	88.5 ft²
Hall	48.1 ft²
Bath	45.4 ft²
Laundry	21.4 ft²	Alcove off the hall

FloorGen's approach: AI that edits a real plan

FloorGen is a plan editor first. The AI in it does not draw pictures; it makes the same edits you could make by hand, on a plan with real walls, and you see each one on the canvas. There are two ways in.

FloorGen AI, inside the editor

Open it with the AI button in the top bar, Ask FloorGen AI, or Ctrl/⌘ + I. It is labeled beta. It works on the open plan and knows what you have selected:

Edits as undoable steps. "Widen the kitchen 2 ft" or "Make it 12′ × 12′" changes the walls; every change is a step you can undo, and Compare shows the plan before and after a reply, as a slider or overlay.
Checks. It can check the plan against the project's code profile (the IRC for a US template) and fix what it finds.
Commands. Type / for shortcuts such as check, furnish, undo, or making two variants of a design to compare.
Images. Attach up to four images per message (PNG, JPEG, WebP or HEIC), for example a photo of a hand sketch, and ask it to turn the sketch into a plan.
Preferences. Tell it something lasting, like a minimum corridor width, and it remembers it for that project's chats.

The editor itself is free and works without an account (see how it compares with other free floor plan software). FloorGen AI may ask you to sign in with a free account before it answers, and it has usage limits that can change; the panel shows how many messages you have left. We are not promising specific limits or pricing here.

Your own AI app, over MCP

If you already use Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor, connect it to FloorGen's MCP server and it works on your plans with tools such as create_project, generate_layout (a whole floor from a room list, packed into a rectangle with doors so every room is reachable, as a starting point to refine), validate_plan and render_2d. Can ChatGPT or Claude draw a floor plan? shows example prompts, the setup guide covers keys and sign-in per client, and the guard rails explains how access levels, confirmations and undo keep an agent in check.

Furnished 3D view of the 800 square foot two-bedroom ADU from above, with beds in both bedrooms, a dining table and a sofa in the open living area. — Because the result is a real plan, the 3D view, exports and checks work on whatever the AI built.

A good way to use an AI floor plan generator

Start from something real. A template or your own measured plan beats a blank page. Asking for "a whole house" in one prompt works, but small steps are easier to check.
Give constraints in numbers. "Two bedrooms, each at least 10 × 11 ft, bath with a tub, 40 × 20 ft outside" gets a better result than "a cozy 2-bed ADU".
Check after every big change, with the checklist above and the editor's issue list.
Look at it in 3D before you decide; problems with circulation are obvious there (floor plan to 3D shows how).
Hand it to a professional for permit drawings. An AI-drawn plan, like a hand-drawn one, is a design starting point, not stamped construction documents.

To try it on a plan of your own, the AI floor plan generator page shows what the in-app chat and the MCP server can do, with plans to start from.

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