The story behind PlanIntel

PlanIntel is built by one person, Tashfeen, with a lot of help from AI agents. No office, no team, no funding. Just a question that would not go away: why is it so hard to find out how planning decisions actually get made in Ireland?

The problem

Every planning decision in Ireland is public. The application, the planner's report, the reasons a council refused or approved it. But the records sit across dozens of council portals, inside scanned PDFs, in formats nobody can search. If you want to know why homes like yours get refused in your area, the honest answer has been: hire someone, or spend weeks reading.

How it works

I build AI software for a living, so I put agents to work on it. A pipeline running on a single GPU in my home office collects each county's public records, reads the scanned documents, and pulls out the decisions, conditions, and refusal reasons in a structured, searchable form. Every record keeps a link back to the council source, so you can always verify what the AI extracted.So far it has indexed 149,612 applications and fully analysed 2,205 of them. Right now it is working through Cavan: 202 of 2,845 applications analysed. You can watch the progress move on the homepage.

Why trust it

The AI does the reading, but it never gets the last word. Extractions are marked with their quality, low confidence results are flagged on the page, and the original council documents are always one click away. When the machine cannot read a document, the record says so instead of guessing.

A small ask

This is an early product built by one person trying to make something genuinely useful. If something looks wrong, confusing, or missing, tell me and I will fix it, usually within a day. And if PlanIntel saved you time, telling a friend or a planning consultant helps more than you know.Write to me at hello@planintel.ie. I read everything.