Our take on AI
littledots is made by people, for people. We like it that way, and we want to keep it that way.
But "made by people" deserves a straight answer when the subject is AI. Let's be fully transparent about where AI does show up in littledots, where it doesn't, and what say you get over any of it.
(Very limited) AI in the app
littledots is not an AI app. There is no feed quietly tuned by a model, nothing reading over your shoulder, and nothing that starts talking to you when you open it. Two of the optional helpers are a conversation with a model, and both sit behind a button you press on one trip when you want them. Nothing opens itself.
We did build a small set of optional helpers. They reach out to outside services, which is worth knowing before you use one, and they are meant to make your life in the app easier. Hunting down a hotel's exact address. Typing out a flight's times by hand. Checking tomorrow's weather. We call them Magic helpers, and two things about them matter more than anything else.
They are off by default. When you first sign in, every one of these is switched off. To use them you go to Settings Privacy Magic helpers and turn them on, once, on purpose. Nothing reaches out to anyone until you decide it should.
They run only when you ask. Even switched on, a helper does nothing until you tap the button that calls it. Never in the background, never silently, never "while you weren't looking."
Most of them have nothing to do with AI. They read a flight number and fill in the route and the times, attach a forecast to a trip, turn a pasted link into an itinerary item, find a hotel by name and bring its address along. Useful, and dull in the way a good tool is dull. Where each one lives, what it does and who powers it has its own article: Magic helpers.
Two of them are AI in the strict sense, and both run on Google Gemini:
- Suggest activity. Tell it what you're after ("a cozy dinner spot near the hotel", "a museum and a park"), and it offers a few options tied to real places, which you can drop into your itinerary or ignore.
- Plan itinerary. A conversation about a whole trip rather than a single item: flights, dinners, the museum for the wet day. Everything you accept waits in a staged list beside your real plan, and nothing reaches the trip until you press Apply.
Both are capped at thirty prompts an hour, and what goes with a prompt is the trip's title, country, dates, location and the titles of what is already on it. Nothing else about you, and nothing from your other trips.
Leave the helpers off and the app still does everything it's meant to. In a slightly less convenient manner.
Full disclosure: a select couple of services are always on:
- the optional "continue with Google" and "continue with Apple" buttons,
- the photo library you can pick a cover image from (Unsplash - completely optional: no need to pick an external image though, you can always upload and pick your own, or go completely without images),
- and the storage that holds the photos and files you upload (Bunny Storage + CDN).
None of those involve AI, and the app lists every external service it talks to, what it does, and when it runs, on one screen at Settings About Third-party services . That screen is the authority, and it is the one place we keep current. Always up-to-date and fully transparent.
AI in how we build it
The second place AI comes up is behind the scenes, in how the app gets made.
For most of its life, littledots was written by hand, line by line. Large parts of the core still are. That craft matters to us, and it isn't going anywhere.
In early 2026 we changed one thing about how we work. We started using AI to help with the writing of the code itself, across the app, the API, and everything in between. We want to be plain about how that works here: the machine helps draft, and a person reads, questions, and signs off on every line before it ships. Nothing lands in our app that a human didn't choose to put there. We own what we build, full stop.
We do this because it lets a small team move carefully on a lot of surface area, without cutting the corners that would show. The bar for what ships didn't move. If anything, having additional sets of eyes on every change raised it.
If this isn't for you
We know feelings about AI run deep, and not everyone lands in the same place. Some of you will read this and nod. Some of you won't, and we respect that completely.
If the idea of software built with AI assistance sits wrong with you, we'd rather tell you straight than bury it in a policy page. And if it's a real dealbreaker, we'd honestly rather you didn't use littledots than open it with a knot in your stomach every time. There are no hard feelings here, and there's no argument we're trying to win. Your comfort with the tools behind the thing is yours to decide.
For everyone staying: thank you. The app stays quiet, the helpers stay optional, and the choices stay yours. That's the deal, and we mean to keep it.