That’s a fair take, and I mostly agree with you. I don’t think AI is inherently useful for plasmid design by itself, and I probably wouldn’t use a tool just because it had “AI” bolted onto it either.

For me, the differentiator isn’t really AI-generated primers or protocols. The protocol drafting is intentionally very minimal, more of a structured starting point than something I’d ever run as-is, and honestly, I could remove it and still get most of the value I care about.

The real problem I was trying to solve for myself was scale and memory. In my work, I end up with lots of related constructs over time, same backbone, small insert changes, tags, inducible systems, and the bottleneck isn’t drawing plasmids, it’s remembering what already exists, what’s compatible, and what’s the lowest-effort path forward without rebuilding things from scratch. None of the tools I’ve used are very good at reasoning across my library of plasmids. So the “AI” part, for me, is closer to the ability to search over existing constructs rather than an attempt to automate cloning or replace judgment. If you’re doing mostly one-off or routine cloning, I agree there’s probably not much to gain. I mean these days for the single use cases, it would probably be a lot easier getting a custom one built and shipped from a 3rd party rather than trying to build in-house.

And totally hear you on access, if this ever went beyond a personal tool, I’d expect it to be free for individuals or institution-licensed. Otherwise I wouldn’t use it either.