How We Use AI
We use AI the way most offices now do: to research, to write code, to edit and to check our work. Here is exactly what it did, what people did, and who is responsible for what you read on this site.
What people did
- Decided what to ask. What a town would cost, what the roads need, what each ballot measure raises.
- Built the first models by hand. The town budget and the road costs started as Excel workbooks. The road workbook is published.
- Chose every assumption. The spending range, the reserve policy, the towns we compare against. Every one was chosen by a committee member.
- Went to the primary source. Lyons and Louisville meeting packets, the Boulder County Assessor, the county engineer, contractor bids. We cite those documents, never an AI answer.
- Decided what the site says. Committee members decide what every page says and review it before it goes up. Much of the text is drafted with AI from their notes and dictation.
What AI did
- Research. It helped us find sources. It was never the source.
- Code. AI wrote most of the code behind this website and the analysis models, to our specification, including the budget’s risk simulation, which is published so anyone can rerun it.
- Drafting and editing. It turns notes and dictation into finished text, including some of our replies to residents’ questions. A committee member reviews and sends every reply.
- Auditing. We use it to look for our own mistakes. It has found real ones. The corrections are on How Our Numbers Have Changed.
- Consistency. Automated checks stop the website from building if a figure on any page disagrees with the model, or if a number we have retired reappears. People wrote the rule each check enforces.
The tools are Anthropic’s Claude, mostly, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Who reviewed it
A person is responsible for every figure we publish. AI approves nothing.
- The models are published. Download the budget model, run one command, and it reproduces our published figures. Change an assumption and see what moves.
- Corrections are dated and public, including the ones that made our numbers worse.
- Two AI tools we built have never been used. A chat assistant that could answer questions about this site has never been released, and will not be. An email tool that could draft replies to questions sent to us has never been used to answer anyone.
Noblestar and Cosmos
Nick Little, the committee’s president, founded Noblestar Technologies, a software company. The software tools we use to build and maintain this site are his company’s, provided to the committee in kind, at no cost. Noblestar builds software that uses AI agents; it has no AI models of its own.
- Our records of Niwot are a structured database, not AI. Parcels, roads, budgets, sources and figures, organised so that software — and AI tools — can read them accurately. Noblestar calls this kind of model a Cosmos. This website is built from it.
- The AI agents are in a different tool. Noblestar’s Command uses AI agents to build software. We use it to build and maintain this website. Nothing runs until a person schedules it, and a person approves every release.
AI in a future Town of Niwot
That is not ours to decide. A town’s use of AI would be decided by the people its residents elect, in public meetings, where residents can weigh in.
Check us
If you want to see how a number was built, we will walk you through the model. Write to contact@niwot.town.