Skip to content
Patens
ES
Back to the foundry

Where Patens stands on AI.

The thing Patens is known for — the audit — has no model in the loop. All 105 rules are deterministic code: geometry, tables, and conventions checked the same way every time, each one citing the primary literature it comes from. A rule that can't explain itself doesn't ship. That's a deliberate position, not a missing feature.

01Deterministic first

Drawing letters is judgment work, and the tools that check it should be auditable themselves. When the audit says a contour self-intersects or a sidebearing drifts, that's a measurement you can reproduce — not a model's opinion. The auto-kern and auto-space suggestions are the same: silhouette geometry, inspectable in the source, applied only when you click Apply. Nothing in the core workflow guesses.

02AI is opt-in, on your key

  • Off by default. No AI feature runs until you add your own Anthropic API key in Settings. Without a key, no AI endpoint is ever called.
  • Your key, your bill, your data path. The key lives in your browser's localStorage. Patens's server proxies the request verbatim and discards it — it stores nothing and adds nothing.
  • Explicit action, visible payload. AI is invoked per-click ("Explain this finding"), never in the background, and sends only what the feature needs.
  • Never trained on your fonts. Your outlines live in your browser's IndexedDB. Patens has no telemetry pipeline, no dataset, and nothing to train — see Privacy.

03What AI is for here

Teaching, not generating. The opt-in features rephrase and expand — "explain this audit finding against my actual glyph" — they don't draw letters for you, and they don't move points. Where research suggests models could help (vision critique of letterforms, for instance), we run the experiment against the deterministic audit as ground truth and publish the results before shipping anything. A model that can't beat the measurable baseline stays a research note.

04For agents and pipelines

The flip side of deterministic-first: the audit makes a solid grounding layer for other people's AI. The CLI (patens audit) and its MCP server expose all 105 rules to coding agents, so an agent editing font sources can check its own work against measurements instead of hallucinating QA. Deterministic core, open interfaces — that's the trade we think type design deserves.

Last updated: 2026-06-10. Send questions to hi@patens.design.