Principles

What We Believe

Jentoo is a set of choices about how an explanation should work. These are the beliefs behind those choices.

Understanding is not processing

A calculator will solve an equation for you. It will not tell you what the equation describes, why it works, or when you would want to reach for it in the first place. Those are different capabilities and only one of them is understanding, which is a distinction that gets lost easily now that answers are cheap.

Most AI tools have optimised for the answer. Ask, receive, move on. That is useful and we use them for exactly that, but it leaves out the part that stays with you.

Douglas Adams got to this first. In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a civilisation builds a machine to compute the answer to life, the universe and everything, waits seven and a half million years, and is told: 42. The machine is not wrong. Nobody had ever established precisely what the question was, so they have to commission a second and far larger computer to go and find it.

The joke is the failure mode. Not a wrong answer but a correct one, handed to somebody who can do nothing with it. An answer you cannot interrogate is a fact you have borrowed rather than something you know, and it holds up right until the question shifts.

We built Jentoo because we think AI should help people understand things and not only finish them.

Show, don't tell

Some things genuinely cannot be understood through text. The way a wave propagates, the way a proof builds, the way supply and demand settle into equilibrium: these have a shape and they happen in an order. Written down, they get flattened into a line of sentences that the reader then has to reassemble into a picture, and the reassembly is where people get lost.

So we show them instead, step by step, the way a good teacher draws on a whiteboard.

Showing is not the same as diagramming, though. Ask about DNA and you should get the helix, the actual twist of it and the rungs running between the strands, rather than a rectangle with the word DNA inside it and an arrow pointing off at another rectangle. A screen of labelled boxes is what happens when a text tool is asked to draw and reaches for the nearest thing it already knows how to do.

Almost everything has a real shape: a molecule, a force, a market, a sorting algorithm. Most of the work is finding it.

Quality is taste

An explanation can be completely correct and still fail. The layout is cluttered, or the pacing is wrong, or the emphasis sits on the wrong element so the eye goes to the wrong place and the point never lands. Nothing in it is false. It just does not work.

We spent a long time trying to turn this into a checklist, because a checklist is easy to verify and easy to improve against. It was the wrong instinct. A figure can satisfy every rule you can name and still feel wrong, and the moment you start optimising for the rules you get things that pass rules. Composition is contextual and holistic in the same way that writing is.

So we treat it as judgment instead of compliance: the same judgment that makes one documentary beautiful and another one boring off identical facts. It is a harder standard to hold and an easier one to miss, and we do miss it.

AI can make mistakes

Every explanation Jentoo generates is written by AI in real time. No human reviews it before you see it. Most of the time it is accurate. Sometimes it is not.

This matters more for pictures than for prose. A diagram carries an authority that a paragraph does not, because it looks like the output of a calculation and so invites less scrutiny. A messy figure with correct content is safer than a polished figure with invented content: the messy one gets double-checked and the polished one gets believed.

We would rather say that plainly than let good design do work that accuracy has not earned. Please verify anything that matters.

Built in public

Jentoo is built by a small team using AI tools. We ship early, improve continuously, and try to be honest about what works and what does not yet.

Public beta is a description of the product's condition, not a badge. Things are missing. Some explanations come out noticeably worse than others. When we get something wrong we say so instead of quietly patching the marketing.

A constitution, not a checklist

None of this was assembled after the fact. It is written down.

Jentoo is governed by an internal document we call the Constitution: the standard the model is held to, covering what it values, how to weigh honesty against polish, and what separates an explanation that is good from one that is merely correct. Everything on this page comes out of it.

It is a living document, revised many times already and due for revision again, because the understanding behind it keeps moving. For what the product actually does, there is the about page. For the longer arguments, the blog.