I work on an estimation engine where the same input always produces the same output. In 2026 that's apparently a controversial design choice. Every other tool in the demo deck has a sparkle icon now. The investor slide that doesn't say "AI-powered" feels like it was printed in 2019 and forgotten. So when a B2B platform's pitch says, in plain text, "the calculation contains no AI" — people stop and ask if that's a typo. It isn't. It's the product. The thing the engine does Let me describe the shape without describing the brand. It's a deterministic software-estimation platform I work on with a client. You feed it a structured project description — features, integrations, target platforms, team composition assumptions, a long list of normalized inputs. It returns a number: hours, cost, range. That number lands in a contract. A buyer signs it. A vendor delivers against it. If the estimate is wrong by 40%, somebody loses money. The engine that produces that number is a few thousand lines of TypeScript.…