Every trade is a microservice.
Who This Matters To (And Why)
Critical: GC,Developer,Architect. These parties make or lose money directly based on this thesis.
Important: Engineer,Banker,Investor. These parties execute decisions shaped by this thesis.
Context: City,Inspector,Broker. These parties need to understand it to avoid friction.
Highest typology impact: Multifamily,Office,Industrial,Mixed Use. Lower impact: Hotel,Retail.
Every trade on a job site is a microservice. The GC is the orchestration layer.
How It Shapes Development
Every trade is a microservice because each contractor delivers a defined set of outputs with specified interfaces, independently of the implementation details inside their scope. The framing contractor provides a structural skeleton with defined dimensions and tolerances. The MEP contractors run systems through that skeleton. The finish contractors apply surfaces to it. Each trade has a defined API: inputs it needs from preceding trades, outputs it delivers to following trades. The project succeeds when the interfaces are clean. It fails when they're not.
Trade sequencing is dependency management. Framing must complete before MEP rough-in. MEP rough-in must complete before insulation. Insulation must complete before drywall. Drywall must complete before finish MEP. This is a directed acyclic graph of trade dependencies, and a construction schedule is a topological sort of that graph with durations attached. A delay in any trade propagates to all downstream trades. The critical path is the longest dependency chain. Managing the schedule means managing the critical path, which means understanding the dependency graph.
Shop drawings are the trade's API documentation. When the mechanical contractor submits shop drawings for ductwork, they are documenting the interface between their system and the building: duct sizes, routing paths, connection points, clearance requirements. The architect reviews shop drawings to confirm that the trade's implementation satisfies the interface specification in the contract documents. A shop drawing that shows a duct routing through a structural member is an interface conflict: the two microservices are trying to occupy the same space. The review process is interface testing before installation.
Trade coordination — BIM clash detection, coordination meetings, trade stacking drawings — is the construction industry's version of integration testing. Each trade models their work independently. The BIM coordinator overlays all trade models and identifies clashes: places where two trades conflict in three-dimensional space. Resolving clashes before installation is cheaper than resolving them in the field by an order of magnitude. A clash detected in the model costs an hour of coordination time. The same clash discovered in the field costs a day of rework, potentially affecting multiple trades who have already completed adjacent work. Integration testing is cheap. Integration failures are expensive.