Hookio AI Policy

How AI is used in Hookio

Hookio does two things to your pattern, and only the first uses AI.

The reading pass. The images or document you imported are sent over an encrypted connection to our own server, which passes them to Google Gemini. The model runs there, never on your device, and our access key is never included in the app. Its whole job is to turn a photographed or scanned page into structure: the stitch operations in each row, the repeats, the count the pattern states at the end of a row, and the yarn weight, yardage and hook size the pattern calls for. This pass never decides anything.

The walking pass. Those rows come back to your device, and a deterministic checker walks them: it applies each row's operations to the previous row's count and compares the count the row reaches against the count the pattern states. Every flag you see is produced here, by arithmetic, on your phone. That is why a flag can be reproduced with a pencil, and it is why we can tell you both numbers instead of asking you to trust us.

The model is given a narrow brief and the restrictions are the point of it. It is instructed to transcribe the structure of the document it is given and nothing else. It is instructed not to write, correct, complete, repair or invent any crochet instruction, count, row or assembly step. It is instructed not to judge whether a row reconciles, which is not its job and is not its output. It is instructed not to comment on the pattern, its designer or the person using the app, and not to give medical, psychological, legal or financial advice, regardless of what it is asked.

A verdict is information, not a guarantee

Everything Hookio produces is informational. A verdict is a starting point for your own judgement, and it is a statement about arithmetic in a document rather than a promise about an object.

Hookio checks whether a pattern's stitch counts reconcile. It does not and cannot promise that the finished piece will look like the designer's photograph, that the pattern is well written, or that it is right for your yarn, your hook or your hands. If the result matters to a decision with real consequences, such as buying yarn for a large project, look at the two counts we show you and check the row yourself.

You stay in charge

Hookio names what does not reconcile and stops there. It never tells you what a flagged row should have said, never supplies a corrected count, never repairs a row, and never writes the assembly instruction a pattern left out. There is no control anywhere in the app that leads to one, and that is a permanent decision rather than a missing feature.

The reason is simple. Naming the problem is a description of your document. Writing the fix would be us authoring crochet instructions, and Hookio supplies no craft instruction of its own except two clearly labelled sample patterns we wrote for people who want to try the app before importing anything.

We do not use AI to take actions on your behalf, and there is no step in the app where a model's output is applied without you seeing it.

Automated decision making

A verdict does not produce legal effects or similarly significantly affect you, and we do not use it to profile you beyond producing the verdict itself. Nothing in the app scores you for a purpose outside the app.

Hookio attaches no score, grade, percentage, star or confidence value to a pattern, to a designer or to you. Every number it shows is a stitch count, a row number, a project count, a length of yarn or a date.

What can go wrong

The reading pass can be wrong. A photograph taken under a lamp, a magazine page at an angle, an unusual abbreviation or a chart drawn as symbols can all be misread, and the arithmetic that follows inherits whatever the reading got wrong.

So the app is built to show it rather than hide it. A row it could not resolve is reported as unread, above the verdict, and a pattern with any unread row is never called clean. A pattern that could not be read at all is said plainly, and it does not consume your free check.

The largest known failure mode is terminology. US and UK crochet abbreviations use the same letters for different stitches, so a pattern read under the wrong convention produces a verdict that is internally consistent, plausible and wrong on every row. Hookio defaults to US terminology, states on every verdict which convention it used, lets you switch in one tap, and tells you when the counts reconcile under the other convention and not under the one it used. Re-checking after a switch is free and never spends a check.

Two readings of the same page can differ. We would rather say this plainly than let a confident tone imply a reliability the technology does not have.

Privacy

What you submit is sent to the model provider only to generate your own verdict. It is not used to train their systems or ours, and we do not send your email address or account identifiers with it.

Your pattern stays yours. It is stored privately to your account or device, it is never shown to another user, never published, never sold and never exported as text. Our Privacy Policy describes what we store afterwards and for how long.

What we do not claim

We do not claim that Hookio is an expert, that it replaces a person who knows crochet, or that its results are guaranteed. We do not claim that a pattern it found nothing to flag in is a good pattern; the word for that result is checked, and it means the counts were walked and nothing more.

Hookio supplies no patterns, generates no patterns, and has no library, catalogue or marketplace. It checks the document you already have.

Changes over time

We change the prompts and the models behind the reading pass as better ones become available, which means a pattern read today and the same pattern read next year could resolve differently.

A verdict you have already been given is not rewritten underneath you. It is computed once and kept as it was, because somebody who bought yarn on a verdict should not find it silently changed. The only re-check the app ever offers is the terminology switch, which you choose and which is free. Where a change materially alters what the app tells you, we will say so in the app rather than let it change silently.