If the calculator itself runs on deterministic logic and arithmetic rather than an LLM, then sure it’s not an "AI-powered product" in the way people usually mean. But saying “Does it use AI? No.” feels incomplete when the article later explains it was materially built through AI-assisted coding. There's nothing wrong with that!
There’s an important distinction here:
* **AI-powered**: the product depends on an AI model to function.
* **AI-assisted**: AI materially helped create the product.
What rubs me the wrong way is the subtle moral framing around AI (“everyone is building AI tools and no one wants them,” “hallucinations are real and scary”) while simultaneously acknowledging that AI made this kind of software accessible to you in the first place...
I think almost all software uses ai in some aspect of writing code or debugging these days, and using it once to write code is very different than having a program that actively puts user data into a LLM or for it to have features that rely on AI reasoning
I think this framing is a bit too binary.
If the calculator itself runs on deterministic logic and arithmetic rather than an LLM, then sure it’s not an "AI-powered product" in the way people usually mean. But saying “Does it use AI? No.” feels incomplete when the article later explains it was materially built through AI-assisted coding. There's nothing wrong with that!
There’s an important distinction here:
* **AI-powered**: the product depends on an AI model to function.
* **AI-assisted**: AI materially helped create the product.
What rubs me the wrong way is the subtle moral framing around AI (“everyone is building AI tools and no one wants them,” “hallucinations are real and scary”) while simultaneously acknowledging that AI made this kind of software accessible to you in the first place...
I think almost all software uses ai in some aspect of writing code or debugging these days, and using it once to write code is very different than having a program that actively puts user data into a LLM or for it to have features that rely on AI reasoning