Prompt or button: building your own tools in Revit and Rhino

With AI, having your own tools in Revit or Rhino is no longer reserved for developers. When to ask Claude live, and when to turn it into a button.

Not long ago, automating Revit or Rhino took a developer, time and a budget. Today, Claude writes the code from a plain-language description. There are two ways to use it, and they are not for the same tasks.

The MCP prompt: AI works with you

Connected to the software through MCP, Claude reads the model and acts on request, live. You describe, it does, you correct.

Best for one-off tasks that change from project to project and need judgement: redrawing a detail from a PDF, creating the rooms of a plan, comparing the brief and the model, checking a model before an issue.

Strengths: almost nothing to install, adapts to each case, you talk it through and adjust.
Limits: you describe the task every time, the result can vary slightly from one run to the next, you need the AI at hand, and every request uses tokens (your subscription or your credits).

The button: your tool, always ready

A plug-in is a tab in the ribbon with your own buttons. Claude writes the code (pyRevit for Revit, Python or C# for Rhino), you put it in the tab, and the whole team uses it.

Best for recurring tasks, identical on every project: renumbering doors, exporting sheets to PDF with the right naming, creating the standard working views, applying the graphic standards.

Strengths: one click, the same result every time, usable by the whole team without writing a prompt, and no AI needed once it is built.
Zero tokens in use: the script lives on your computer. The AI is used once, to write it; after that every click costs no tokens, whether you use it ten times or a thousand.
Limits: you build it and then keep it up to date, and it does exactly what it was made for, nothing more.

How to choose

The task changes every time? MCP prompt.
It comes back identically on every project? Button.
The whole team needs it, including people who do not use AI? Button.
It comes back often and you want to save tokens? Button.
It means reading a document, a PDF, a brief? MCP prompt.

A simple rule: if you make the same request for the third time, turn it into a button.

The best of both

The path we recommend:

Try the task as an MCP prompt, and adjust until you are happy with the result.
When it keeps coming back, ask Claude to turn it into a button.
Put it in the team's tab, next to the others.

The task we just did together comes back on every project.
Turn it into a pyRevit button: a commented script that asks for
confirmation before changing the model, with an icon and a short name.
Tell me where to put the folder so it appears in our [name] tab.

What it changes