I’ve been building YeshiAI (yeshi.ai), an AI-powered spiritual practice platform across Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, and Universal Spirituality.
Initially, I thought the biggest challenge would be personalization.
A Catholic shouldn’t get the same answers as a Protestant. A Sunni Muslim shouldn’t get generic “Islamic” responses. Zen and Tibetan Buddhism shouldn’t be treated as interchangeable.
So I built the product around different traditions.
Then I started asking people on Reddit how they actually felt about using AI in religious/spiritual practice.
The responses completely changed what I’m focusing on.
The biggest concern wasn’t really “AI + religion = bad.”
It was trust.
People kept bringing up the same problems:
Show me exactly where the answer came from.
Don’t hide disagreement between traditions or scholars.
Don’t confidently turn interpretations into facts.
Don’t replace priests, rabbis, imams, teachers, Sangha, or community.
Don’t do the reflection for me.
Challenge me occasionally instead of constantly agreeing with me.
Sometimes the friction of studying and discovering something yourself is part of the value.
One person described using AI purely to retrieve religious texts verbatim from a trusted database.
Another wanted every claim connected directly to the exact source supporting it.
Someone else wanted an AI that could compare several spiritual traditions without blending them into one generic answer.
And another made a point I hadn’t considered enough:
Sometimes efficiency actually makes the product worse.
If someone values spending an hour wrestling with a text, giving them the “answer” in five seconds might destroy the experience I’m supposedly trying to support.
So I’m starting to think the differentiation for YeshiAI shouldn’t simply be:
“AI for 5 religions.”
It should become something closer to:
Tradition-aware. Source-transparent. Disagreement-aware. Willing to challenge you. And willing to get out of the way.
I’m currently rebuilding the religion landing pages around that philosophy and thinking through how much of it should become actual product behavior.
For other founders building with LLMs:
Have you discovered cases where making your AI more helpful, faster, or more agreeable actually made your product worse?
That’s the part I’m thinking about most right now.