Is AI the End of Dynamo? What's New in Dynamo 4.0 for Revit 2027 (Replay)

Last week I sat down with John Pierson from the Autodesk Dynamo team to walk through Dynamo 4.0 in Revit 2027 and answer the question a lot of us keep circling back to: with AI writing scripts and Revit Assistant baked right in, is there still a reason to learn visual programming? Short answer, yes, and the reasons are more interesting than I expected.

What We Covered

Dynamo 4.0 is mostly an under-the-hood release, and that's a good thing. It now runs on Python.NET 3 and .NET 10, with real performance gains in the geometry engine. If you work with topo solids or drape geometry, point projections are noticeably faster. The .NET 10 jump also unlocks add-in isolation in Revit 2027, which means the days of uninstalling plugins one by one to find the thing that broke Dynamo should finally be behind us.

A few quality-of-life wins stood out. Groups can now be resized and collapsed, and they only show the inputs and outputs that are actually connected instead of every possible port. Paneling nodes that lived in beta for years are now in the box. And here's the one I'd act on today: right-click almost any Revit node and you can open a built-in sample file. John actually built a lot of those samples himself before he joined Autodesk, and roughly 80 percent of Revit nodes now have coverage.

Then we got into AI. The biggest mental unlock for me was understanding that an MCP server is not the full Revit API. It only does what someone hardcoded it to do, which is why a public Revit MCP might only expose seven actions. But because every Dynamo node is already an API call wrapped in human-written documentation, running the assistant inside Dynamo can reach far more of Revit than a hand-built MCP. As John put it, you give the AI the tools to build the tools.

The most useful takeaway is a workflow you can use right now. Instead of having Claude write Python that you then have to deploy through PyRevit, have it write Dynamo-flavored Python, paste it into a node, and hit run. You get a visual feedback loop and a deployment framework for free, and you stay in control of your own work rather than depending on a third-party tool that might break the next time .NET changes.

Watch the Replay Here...

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So You Want to Learn the Revit API??

Some of you may remember Harry Mattison from our launch of SAuBIM v2.0 not too long ago...  Well, Harry has created a course on Udemy (a really awesome site) about the Revit API.  His course contains over five hours of lectures!

Harry is very knowledgeable about the Revit API and was a pleasure to team up with for SAuBIM.  So if you have been wanting to learn how to make your own Revit API add-ins and increase your productivity you should definitely give Harry's class a look.  He also has a 5 star rating so far with some very nice testimonials.

Click here to view Harry's class "Learn to program the Revit API: Learn how to write C# code for the Revit API to customize, automate, and improve Autodesk Revit software." on Udemy...

**Using the link above will save you some money thanks to Harry! **

Boost Your BIM - New Revit API Blog!

There is a cool new Revit API blog with a nice simple layout.  Here is a description from the author, Harry.

Hi – I hope you find this blog both informative and thought-provoking! With 14 years experience as an employee of Revit Technology Corp & Autodesk, including 4 years as a developer on the Revit API team, I hope to make your work with Revit more productive and enjoyable. If you are interested in custom development or training (online or in-person), please contact me at BoostYourBIM@gmail.com - Regards, Harry

Do you use Revit? Interesting in making it better? Instead of waiting for the next release from Autodesk, this blog will be a place to explore how we can improve Revit now with its API to customize, integrate, and enhance it. Please post comments and questions about what would interest you.

Definitely a blog you want to start following!

Click here to check it out now!

Bitmap to Panel

Talk about making your mind spin. Check out this post from Buildz:

Let me be the first to admit I have an unhealthy relationship with my software. But this is too cool to not gush about.

Harry the API Guru did a course on using the API in the revit 2010 massing environment at AU2009 just a few weeks ago: "Creating and Analyzing New Conceptual Massing Geometry With the Autodesk® Revit® API". Unfortunately, I was unable to attend, but I was given the opportunity to test drive some of the tools he made for the course before hand. Hands down the best one yet is Harry's SetParamFromImage.

Conceptually the tool is dead simple. You have a bitmap that is 12x12 pixels. You have a divided surface that is 12x12. The panels in your divided surface contain a parameter called Grayscale, and the API will write a value from 0" (white) to 12"(black) based on the pixel values of the image. Tah dah!... Continue to rest of post and pictures...

Create a New Ribbon Tab

I usually don't post much stuff from The Building Coder and various Revit API blogs for the simple reason that I don't want to scare many of my readers. I know when I first saw a screenshot of Revit API code I was a little freaked out. Now, I find it a whole new frontier for me and love to read about it (even if I only understand some of it). Here is a great one from The Building Coder and Redbolts:

Custom Ribbon Tab - Building Coder

I am still on tour presenting at the Western European DevDays conferences, and with no time for blogging or responding to comments. In fact, I have almost no time for anything at all except presenting, meeting and discussing with participants during the day, and getting from one city to the next in the evenings. Right now I am sitting in the airport waiting for a plain to Milano. Back to Bella Italia, albeit for less than twenty-four hours.

I was hoping to find time to prepare a few blog posts in advance for the coming weeks, when I will be gone on holidays and vacation. Friday is supposed to be my last working day this year, and I am starting to wonder whether I will be able to just walk away from all the unresolved issues and leave them to lie until next year.

Anyway, in a sleepless hour in between I noticed that Augusto Gonçalves responded once again to a question that has already come up a few times in the past, so his interesting result is well worth while presenting, even if it is not directly useful in the context of the Revit API. It deals with the frequent question on whether it is possible to add your own ribbon tab to the Revit user interface.

Question: I expect the answer to this is no, but I thought I would at least ask anyway. Is it possible to create a new ribbon tab in Revit, similar to AutoCAD 2010, or are panels within the Add-Ins tab and items within those panels the only ribbon objects that can be accessed and created from a Revit add-in? ... Continue to post to read the answer...





Merry Christmas – Ribbons,tabs and Panels

It’s that time of the year, so why not finish with a post on what has probably been the most controversial aspect of the Revit 2010 release, the ribbon. In general I’ve stayed clear of UI customisation because I’d prefer Autodesk get it right. However, for API users the ability to add a tab for their own commands has been on the wishlist since the ribbon went live. Jeremy talked about it here with the limitation you couldn’t run API commands.
Using a little smoke and mirrors it is possible however to run API commands. The key is creating a Revit ribbon panel not a base Autodesk panel. This then allows you to use all the standard constructs for creating buttons and therefore running API commands when the button is clicked.

The code is very similar to creating buttons using the standard API’s.... Continue...