WillTools: precast shop-ticket QC and panel handling tools

Public demo snapshot of an in-house pyRevit extension for precast concrete
shop-ticket QC (37 checks / 46 checklist rows) and a standalone panel
handling solver (PCI Chapter 8).

- No client, job, plant or product data: knowledge layers ship as
  structural templates only.
- Ticket QC's model-read escalation targets a LAN model server endpoint
  (configurable), not a cloud provider.
- Built from the private development repo via tools/make_dist.py.

WillTools.extension/lib/vibe/compat.py

@@ -0,0 +1,31 @@
+# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
+"""The small Python 2 / Python 3 bridge.
+
+We do not choose the interpreter -- pyRevit does, from the engine configured
+for the host.  This extension was written on Revit 2025 with IronPython 2.7,
+but the same folder may be dropped on a machine whose pyRevit is set to
+IronPython 3 or CPython 3, where `unicode` and `basestring` are a NameError.
+
+A NameError at module scope takes the whole button down with a traceback the
+user cannot act on, so the two names are resolved once, here.
+
+Everything else in this extension is already written in the intersection of
+the two languages: no f-strings, no print statement, no implicit integer
+division, no pathlib.  Keep it that way and the engine stops mattering.
+"""
+
+try:                                  # Python 2 (IronPython 2.7)
+    text_type = unicode               # noqa: F821
+    string_types = (str, unicode)     # noqa: F821
+except NameError:                     # Python 3 (IronPython 3, CPython 3)
+    text_type = str
+    string_types = (str,)
+
+
+def as_text(value, encoding='utf-8'):
+    """Return value as the interpreter's unicode text type."""
+    if isinstance(value, text_type):
+        return value
+    if isinstance(value, bytes):
+        return value.decode(encoding)
+    return text_type(value)