Why Is It Called SimpleFormat "AI"?

We Love AI. Seriously.

Let's get this out of the way: we're not anti-AI. Far from it. AI helped build this website. AI helped build SimpleFormat Pro. We use AI tools every single day for coding, writing, brainstorming, and about a hundred other things.

AI is genuinely amazing. It's transformed how we work. We're huge fans.

But here's the thing...

AI Cannot Format Documents (We Tried)

Like everyone else in 2025, we thought "AI can do anything!" So we tried to build a document formatter powered by AI. Tell it to format your paper in APA 7, and it would do it perfectly. No more memorizing rules. Just vibes and machine learning.

Reader, it did not work.

Here's the problem: document formatting is all rules. APA 7 says margins must be exactly 1 inch. Not "about 1 inch." Not "1 inch-ish." Exactly 1 inch.

AI doesn't do "exactly." AI does "probably" and "usually" and "here's my best guess." Which is great for writing poetry and terrible for formatting academic papers.

We watched in horror as our AI formatting assistant:

• Made up citation rules that don't exist
• Insisted APA uses footnotes (it doesn't)
• Applied MLA rules to an APA paper because "they're similar"
• Hallucinated an entirely fictional "APA 8th Edition"
• Confidently told users that hanging indents are optional (they're not)

The worst part? It did all this with complete confidence. No hesitation. Just wrong, loudly.

So We Built It The Boring Way

We gave up on AI formatting and did what we should have done from the start: we read the actual style guides and wrote deterministic code that follows the rules exactly.

SimpleFormat Pro doesn't guess. It doesn't hallucinate. It doesn't have "creative interpretations" of margin widths. It just applies the formatting rules from the official manuals, every time, correctly.

Revolutionary, we know.

But Why Keep "AI" in the Name?

Two reasons:

1. We're bootstrapped. We already owned the domain. When you're funding everything yourself, you don't throw away a perfectly good domain name just because the original plan didn't work out. That's not scrappy, that's just wasteful.

2. It's kind of funny. Every startup in 2025-2026 slapped "AI" on their product whether it made sense or not. AI-powered toasters. AI-enhanced spreadsheets. AI-driven... filing cabinets, probably.

We kept the name as a gentle parody of the AI-everything trend. We're the company that actually tried using AI for our core feature, discovered it doesn't work for that specific thing, and pivoted to boring reliable code instead.

The "AI" in our name is a little inside joke. We're here to fix what AI breaks—specifically, your document formatting after you asked ChatGPT to "make it APA style."

The Two SimpleFormats

To be clear about what's what:

• SimpleFormat AI (this site, simpleformatai.pro) — A blog and resource hub with formatting guides, tips, and 100+ links to writing centers and citation resources. Free for everyone.
• SimpleFormat Pro (simpleformat.pro) — The actual formatting tool. Paste your content, pick a style, download a perfectly formatted document. Works because it uses rules, not guesses.

The Moral of the Story

Use AI for what it's good at. We do! But know its limits. Document formatting needs precision, and precision isn't AI's strong suit.

Sometimes the right tool for the job is just... code that does exactly what the manual says.

And sometimes you keep a domain name because you're bootstrapped and resourceful like that.

Want to Format a Document?

Stop asking ChatGPT to fix your margins. It can't. (We still love it though.) Try SimpleFormat Pro instead—it actually works for formatting, because formatting needs rules, not predictions.