Simple by design: why there's no AI in Fider right now

Simple by design: why there's no AI in Fider right now

Fider doesn't have any AI features. There's no chatbot or auto-generated summaries. And no assistant that sorts your requests for you.

That's on purpose. It also isn't something our users have been asking for. In fact, nobody has asked us for AI at all.

Plenty of software now bundles AI features by default, including tools in our own category. So it's fair to ask why we haven't.

Here's our thinking on why we're leaving AI out for now, but also, where we think it might be able to help. We’ll also clarify what you can do if you want AI working with your board.

AI you didn't ask for

We don't think the lack of demand is unique to Fider. We don't actually see much appetite for AI in software in general.

What we do see is AI being pushed into it. Like the "Ask Meta AI" button that turned up in WhatsApp. Did anyone actually ask for it, other than product managers at Meta?

There are plenty of stories out there of unwanted AI causing problems.

Uninvited AI can bring a bill with it, for starters. In October 2025, Australia's consumer regulator sued Microsoft, alleging it told Microsoft 365 subscribers they had to accept its Copilot AI assistant and a higher price, or cancel. According to the regulator, a cheaper plan without Copilot existed, but subscribers weren't told about it.

Meanwhile, more and more apps describe themselves as "AI-powered" when it’s just a thin wrapper around someone else’s AI model. It's boring and unoriginal, and doesn’t serve customers particularly well. Where did the creativity go? For many of these offerings, it’d be more accurate to describe them as "AI-powered slop."

We're not against AI, and this isn't a lecture about using it. If you've picked an AI tool because it makes your work better, that's your call. What we don't like is AI that's chosen for you: a feature someone else decided you needed, switched on by default, and added to your bill.

A feedback board is only as good as the people using it

So - feedback boards, then. The whole point of Fider is to collect feedback from real users. Human opinion is the product.

‍AI can’t tell you about the experience of using your product. People use your app, they have their own experience of it, and they tell you about it in their own words.

That's where a feedback post gets its value. Someone used your product, hit a snag or wanted something more, and took a minute to describe it. And someone voting on it is them saying "me too." If you take the people out, it’s just automated text without any substance.

We've already seen what happens when a feedback channel fills up with generated text. curl, the open-source tool for transferring data, ended its bug bounty in January 2026. The program had worked well for years, but among other problems, the maintainers were buried in AI-generated reports. By the end, fewer than one in 20 submissions were real.

A feedback board is the place users go to be heard. It stays alive when real people reply to real people (we've written about what happens when a board goes quiet). We can't imagine Fider ever becoming a dumb board full of AI agents chatting to each other.

Where AI could help, and what it costs

To be fair, there are places AI could make a board easier to run.

On a busy board, it could flag possible duplicates or summarize a long comment thread. We understand the appeal. (Fider handles duplicates the low-tech way for now: you mark a post as a duplicate, and its votes move over to the original.)

But AI features come with costs which shouldn’t be ignored:

• Money. AI costs money to run, and someone has to pay for it. Often that's the customer, through a pricier plan or a usage fee.
• Accuracy. AI can be confidently wrong. In 2025, the AI support agent at Cursor, a popular coding tool, told a customer about a policy that didn't exist. Users canceled their subscriptions before a co-founder stepped in to say, "We have no such policy."
• Trust. A feedback tool only works if you believe what it tells you. A summary that gets your users wrong? That’s probably worse than no summary.

Our bar for building anything AI-driven is that it truly helps users. A shortcut that analyzes some data and presents it as fact—when it might be completely wrong—doesn't count. It has to be something real.

Your data is yours

Leaving AI out of Fider doesn't mean keeping AI away from your feedback.

Fider is open source, with a public API and webhooks. If you want to run your board's posts through an AI tool, you can: summarize them, look for themes, or feed them into whatever you already use. Some people have already built connectors that link AI assistants to a Fider board. And if you self-host, your data sits in your own database, so it's yours to work with however you like.

That's the kind of AI we're comfortable with: the kind you choose, on your own terms. We'd just ask for one thing: keep the posts human.

Want AI in Fider? Let us know!

We said "right now" in the title for a reason. We're not ruling AI out forever, and we're open to suggestions.

If there's an AI feature that would make your board better, post it on our feedback board. Other users can vote on it, and we'll reply with a status, the way we do with every post. That's what the board is for.