Make AI-Generated Calculators Explain Their Inputs

OpenAI's October 7 announcement introduces GPT-6 and Intelligent UI, which can generate responses with interactive components like forms, charts, and buttons. This progress highlights the need for developers to make calculations behind user-friendly interfaces transparent. The article presents a simple calculator example to demonstrate how to do this.

The calculator takes three inputs: monthly request count, average minutes per request, and productive support minutes available per person in the same month. The calculator multiplies the request count by the average minutes per request to determine workload minutes, then divides this by productive minutes per person to calculate a fractional staffing estimate.

Rounding up provides a whole-person capacity estimate. It's important to note that scheduled work hours and productive support minutes are distinct inputs, and monthly averages do not account for peak-hour coverage. The calculator's interface should explicitly state these assumptions near the result, as they are factors to review with those familiar with the work.

The provided JavaScript function, estimateCapacity, is a simple pure function that returns consistent results given the same inputs and does not alter any external systems. If any inputs are missing or invalid, the function returns a "needs_input" or "invalid_input" status, indicating what information is required for a correct calculation.

To ensure accuracy, the function can be tested with known results in a Node environment before integrating it into a user interface.