How to Build a Revit Addin with AI — Simple Guide

I’m an architect who transitioned into software development years ago. I often get requests to build simple plugins, but I usually focus only on the more complex ones. So in this post, I’ll walk you through how to use AI so that anyone can build a Revit addin plugin themselves — no prior coding experience needed.

What You Need to Build a Revit Addin with AI (ChatGPT or Claude)

1. A computer with Revit installed.
2. ChatGPT Desktop or Claude Desktop. This matters because it gives the AI full context and execution tools — through MCP (Model Context Protocol), the AI can read your files, write code, and run system-level commands on your machine.
3. At minimum a Pro subscription for ChatGPT or Claude. With the free tier you’ll burn through tokens fast and won’t be able to finish the plugin.

Once you’ve got those three things sorted, you’ve already done the hardest part.

The next step is just prompting the AI and letting it do the work. It doesn’t have to be fancy, but your prompt should at least include the following so you can easily modify things later.

Let me show you the simplest possible example: a plugin that pops up a dialog saying “Welcome to my first addin.” Once you’ve got this down, you can ask the AI to build far more complex plugins.

Just prompt something like this:

“Create a folder named welcome on drive D and build a Revit plugin in it. Add a menu tab called Welcome, and when clicked, show a dialog with the text ‘Welcome to my first addin.’ Then build a welcome.msi installer so I can install it onto my Revit 2026.”

The AI will ask follow-up questions if anything is missing, and it’ll finish the job quickly and cleanly.

Later on, just ask the AI to go back into the same folder to add features or fix bugs.

Key Point

The core insight here is simple: as long as you give the AI enough context (it runs on your machine, Revit is already installed, and your requirements are described in detail), the AI can build Revit add-ins.

A few notes specific to Revit that save a lot of back-and-forth with the AI:

• You don’t actually need an MSI to test. A Revit add-in is just a compiled .dll plus a tiny .addin manifest XML that points to it. If you tell the AI to drop the .addin file straight into %AppData%\Autodesk\Revit\Addins\2026\, the plugin loads on the next Revit launch with zero installer — far faster for iterating than rebuilding an MSI every change.
• Tell the AI exactly which Revit version you target, because the runtime changed. Revit 2025 and 2026 run on .NET 8, while 2024 and earlier run on the old .NET Framework 4.8 — a 2026-built add-in will silently fail to load in Revit 2024, so the AI must set the right target framework or your “working” plugin just never appears in the ribbon.
• Most “my button does nothing / Revit shows a security warning” problems come from one thing the AI often forgets: the add-in DLL must be unblocked and, ideally, the .addin manifest given a vendor GUID. If the AI’s plugin loads but throws on a command, paste the full exception text back — nearly every Revit API call must happen inside a Transaction, and forgetting to wrap model edits in using (var t = new Transaction(doc)) is the single most common crash the AI introduces.
• This approach covers about 80% of the simple Revit plugin needs of a small company — for the most common data tasks (bulk parameter edits, sheet renames, room data), Metasheet already handles these without any custom code. This is what people call vibe coding — AI-assisted addin development. Over time you’ll build up intuition for it.
• For more complex work — especially anything involving geometry, families, or large data structures — AI can’t operate this way on its own. You’ll need a professional developer using a proper code editor (Visual Studio with the RevitLookup add-in for inspecting elements is the practical baseline), controlling every step, testing, debugging, and guiding the AI.

Hope this helps your company tap into AI and stay competitive.

Nguyen Huu Khanh

Architect turned developer