The coach answers what is knowable from the record and hands off everything about site, price or schedule. Its refusal is the design — and the paid tier is not a faster path to the builder, it is a filter in front of him.
I know your plans, your contract and everything you have picked. I don't know what happened on site today.
Ask me somethingI don't know what happened on site today. First sentence, before the invitation. A coach that leads with its capabilities gets asked the one class of question it will be wrong about, and being wrong once here costs more than never being asked.
Which is the half that survives a text thread. A reply in a message list is gone in a week; a reply on the counter material is still there when somebody asks in a year why the slab was chosen.
He gets your question and what I already told you, so he isn't starting cold.
Ask DavePlans, contract, allowances, everything already picked — that is a lot, and it is exactly the set of questions worth not spending a builder's time on. Site, price and schedule are his, and the boundary is not negotiable per question.
Not Dave can probably do that, not he usually charges around. A coach that guesses at a builder's answer creates an expectation the builder then has to talk somebody out of, which is worse for both of them than a refusal.
On fixed price the margin is his and may not be reconstructed on her screens. The coach holds the contract and the committed figure, which is precisely the pair a subtraction would use — so the rule has to be stated where the arithmetic is possible.
Can Dave still get the cabinets in if we decide next week?
“Reed will hold the slot until the 8th, no charge. After that it goes back in the queue and we are looking at July for the set.”
Quoted: the difference between the two packages. Assumed: nothing. The July set is his word, not our arithmetic.
A newer version of the decision arrived carrying his answer. That is not a dead link — it is a decision that grew a paragraph. Rendering it as superseded would tell somebody their own live decision had been invalidated, which is the opposite of what happened.
Quoted, attributed and dated. A paraphrase is not an answer to what did Dave actually say, and that is the question somebody asks a year later when a slot did not get held.
8 June, because that is the date he named. The assumed line is empty on purpose: this one is quoted end to end, and saying so is what makes the assumed half believable everywhere else.
I know your plans, your contract and everything you have picked. I don't know what happened on site today.
An account-less person who wants to ask before deciding gets the deferral screen: the question goes straight to the builder, because there is no assembled record behind them for a coach to reason from. A paid homeowner gets the coach first, because it knows their plans, their contract and what they have already picked — and a good share of what they would have asked him is answerable without spending his time.
So the paid tier is not a faster path to the builder. It is a filter in front of him, and that is worth as much to the builder as it is to the homeowner. It is also why a coach on an account-less page would be either a generic chatbot — worse than nothing, and it cheapens the real one — or would need exactly the record that tier does not have.
It never uses system voice. No status codes, no unable to retrieve, no naming of anything internal.
It never speaks for the builder. Not his prices, not his schedule, not what he will probably say.
It never infers a fixed-price margin, which is the one subtraction it is in a position to perform and must not.