PrecisionDocs

Bootstrap & Ordinances — Help Center

How ordinance discovery works, when chat unlocks, and how to fix wrong-source ingests.

How does ordinance discovery work?

When you create a project, the platform races three known ordinance hosts in parallel and falls back to open-web discovery if all miss.

Discovery race (in priority order):

  1. Municode — JSON API, fastest and most reliable when the municipality publishes there.
  2. AmLegal — async export-first, downloads the full code as one HTML artifact.
  3. eCode360 — static-HTML chapter scraping (public web portal, no license required).

Open-web fallback — if the race misses, a Brave search finds candidate URLs and runs them through:

  • L1 + L2 keyword gate — rejects sanitary districts, school districts, park districts, fire districts, water-reclamation districts on negative keywords; passes trusted platforms or .gov domains.
  • L3 LLM second-opinion — for weak L2 passes (city slug in URL but no positive keyword), a single Haiku call decides MUNICIPAL / NON_MUNICIPAL / UNCERTAIN.

The same gate runs on URLs you paste into the wizard or the LifeBuoy support form, so non-municipal entities cannot reach the corpus by any path.

How do I add supplemental ordinance, zoning, or code sources?

Use supplemental sources when the answer lives outside the main municipal or county code set.

Common supplemental sources:

  • Standalone zoning ordinance
  • Land-development code
  • Subdivision regulations
  • Stormwater or drainage manual
  • Design standards or overlay district PDF
  • County floodplain, well, septic, or access rules that are published separately

Where to add them:

  1. During project creation, add known supplemental sources in the wizard before bootstrap starts.
  2. On Project Home, use Add ordinance source from the ordinance/source cards to add a URL or upload a PDF.
  3. In chat, paste an official URL and ask the agent to ingest it for the project.
  4. If you do not know the URL, ask the agent to find and index the relevant ordinance source, then review the result.

Supplemental sources are reference sources by default. Do not mark one as governing unless the app indicates the governing source is missing and you are confident the supplemental source is the controlling code.

Best prompt: The stormwater rules are in a separate county drainage manual. Find or ingest that source, then answer using it with citations.

Why is bootstrap waiting for the county?

Chat now waits for both municipality and county pipelines to finish indexing.

What you will see:

  • The bootstrap dial holds at 70% while the municipal scrape is done but the county is still indexing — that is intentional.
  • When both finish, the dial advances to 100% and chat unlocks.
  • If county fails (404 from the publisher, no clear source on the open web), the dial caps at 95% and chat still unlocks. Reports that need county-level rules will note the gap.

Why both:

  • County codes own subdivision rules, well/septic, stormwater detention requirements, and floodplain regulations in many jurisdictions.
  • Answering "What are the setback requirements?" correctly often requires both city zoning code AND county subdivision regs.

You can refresh either pipeline independently from the project home once bootstrap completes.

I think the wrong ordinance source was indexed. What now?

Use the LifeBuoy button in the top-right corner of the project home hero to request ingestion support.

Include the municipality, county, and state when you report the issue. PrecisionDocs scopes ordinance sources by municipality and county, so same-name jurisdictions are treated separately.

The dialog accepts two optional fields:

  • Suggested municipality URL — paste the correct muni code source if the auto-discovered one is wrong.
  • Suggested county URL — same for county.

Both URLs are SSRF-validated, checked against the project jurisdiction context, and run through the municipal-relevance gate before being sent. A URL for the wrong county, a school district, a sanitary district, or another non-governing entity should be rejected instead of silently becoming your project source.

The support team receives the request as labeled rows in an email so they can fix the source via copy-paste rather than back-and-forth email threads.

Rate limit: 3 requests per hour per project. If you hit the cap, contact info@precisiondocs.ai directly.

Can I check an ordinance URL before creating the project?

Yes — the project wizard now has a Verify button next to each ordinance URL input.

When you click Verify:

  1. The URL is SSRF-checked.
  2. The page is classified (HTML index? PDF? Municode platform? something else?).
  3. The jurisdiction check compares the source to the project municipality, county, and state.
  4. The L1+L2+L3 municipal-relevance gate runs.
  5. You see a result like Detected: HTML index, ~18 chapters or a rejection reason.

If the verifier rejects the URL, project creation is blocked until you replace or remove the URL — this prevents you from spending bootstrap time on a sanitary district URL that happens to contain your city name.

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