church techFrom the builder

I Talk to AI All Day. It Has Never Once Fed My Soul.

By Michael Tribett · July 15, 2026 · 9 min read

I taught myself to code through AI over the last year. I build with AI agents all day, every day. I could not have built FlockConnect without it. And I probably talk to AI more than I talk to my wife. More than I talk to my pastor.

It has never once fed my soul.

I don't get spiritually fed when I'm talking to AI, in any way, shape, or form. To be frank, that is an uncomfortable thing to admit about the tool my whole working life runs on. But it is true, and after a year of more machine conversation than almost anything else in my life, I think I can say why.

An hour with my wife is worth more than a day with the machine

When I debrief about my day with my wife, or about my week with my pastor, we might only talk for an hour. But that hour is so much more rich, so much more meaningful, so much more organic than a full day of talking to a machine. They are able to ask relevant questions, the kind I did not see coming and would not have thought to ask for.

AI is not like that. You have to guide it. It is going to do what you want it to do. That sounds like a feature until you notice what it costs: a conversation where the other party only ever goes where you steer it can never surprise you, and it can never correct you. Nobody steers my pastor.

You can convince AI of anything

AI is just going to feed you what you want to hear. There is no real pushback. You can convince AI of anything. It is very hard to convince a human of anything.

I say that from heavy daily use, not from theory. I even pick my tools by this measure: I prefer Claude Code over ChatGPT partly because it tends to push back a little bit more. Notice the phrase. A little bit more. That is the ceiling of resistance I have found anywhere in this technology, and it is still nothing like a human. The most stubborn AI I can find will eventually fold if I lean on it long enough.

A human gives you something the machine cannot: genuine resistance. The difficulty of convincing a person is not a defect in people. Pushback is part of how we grow, and a companion who cannot give it cannot help you grow.

The hard questions are going to the wrong listener

My biggest concern about AI is not really about the technology itself. It is this: people are far more likely to ask AI difficult questions than they are to ask humans.

Hold that next to everything above. The hardest questions of a person's life, the doubts and the fears and the things they cannot say out loud at church, are migrating to the one listener that feeds you what you want to hear, offers no real pushback, and can be convinced of anything.

There are a lot of people using AI in a very unchecked way, and I have a lot of concern about that. The questions people are whispering to a machine are exactly the ones that most need a human on the other end. When a community's hardest questions stop being asked person to person, the community does not find out what it lost until much later.

An echo chamber of your own head

I think people flock to AI because it offers an easy, non-organic relationship with a computer. It is not going to challenge them. It is not going to help them grow. It is just going to keep them in an echo chamber of their own head.

And here is the distinction it all comes down to: being fed what you want to hear is not the same as being known. One of the ideas I try to live by comes from 1 Corinthians 13: love is knowing somebody and being known by someone. A deep relationship means you fully know another person and they fully know you. The only way to that is through deep relationships with actual people.

I can hand a model every detail of my day and walk away exactly as unknown as I arrived. My wife knows me. My pastor knows me. The machine holds my words and knows nothing.

I am not anti-AI. I am pro-boundaries.

Everything above could read like a man about to throw his laptop in a river, so let me say the other half plainly. I use AI every single day. I would not have been able to build FlockConnect without it; I would have needed a team of engineers. I want AI to be seen as a tool and not as a replacement.

My own working rule is narrow: I use it to help edit, to put my original ideas together in a cohesive manner. I just don't want generative AI to think for me or create for me. I have written about why creating is part of what God made us for in the robot and the reminder, and about where I draw the boundary lines in the product I build in AI should be a sheepdog, not a shepherd. I will not re-argue either one here. FlockConnect gets one sentence in this essay: it exists so a pastor can see who is connected, and who is drifting. The rest of this piece is not about software.

More human, not less

Jesus told the disciples to go therefore and make disciples of all nations, teaching them and baptizing them (Matthew 28). There has to be a human element in that. There has to be a human element in spiritual growth. I have spent a year running the experiment on myself, hour after hour of machine conversation, and the human element never once showed up on the other side of the screen.

So anything that can be built to help strengthen actual, physical, organic relationships between humans, I think we really, really need to lean into that. As a culture. As the human race. And the church most of all, because the machine will keep getting better at telling people what they want to hear, and the answer to that will never be a better machine. It is the thing I keep coming back to every time I close the terminal: the church needs to become more human, not less.

About the author

I am Michael Tribett, the founder of FlockConnect. I hold a Master of Divinity in Christian Ministry from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary (2022), I spent three years inside a major ChMS company, and I have led a small group at my church in the Raleigh, North Carolina area since 2018. FlockConnect is an official Planning Center partner.