The AI Feature I Chose Not to Build

Would it improve people's lives? Replace jobs? Weaken human connection? Change healthcare? I still don't know the answers to most of those questions. What I do know is that while building my app Ninefold, I kept coming back to one question. What actually creates meaningful self-reflection?

Therapy helps. So do relationships, books, mentors, and sometimes technology. But none of those things can do the reflecting for us. At some point we have to be willing to sit with hard questions, tolerate not knowing, and make our own meaning from our own experiences. Our deepest insights are rarely handed to us. They tend to show up when we slow down long enough to notice something we hadn't seen before.

That belief shaped everything about Ninefold.

The app offers psychoeducation, guided practices, and ideas drawn from psychology and philosophy. But it deliberately avoids interpreting your experience. It asks questions instead of giving answers. I never wanted someone to finish a practice thinking "this app understands me." I wanted them to leave understanding themselves a little better.

The easiest product decision would have been to add an AI chatbot. It could summarize journal entries, identify emotional themes, generate personalized reflections, and create the feeling of a therapist in your pocket. I left it out on purpose.

Not because I think AI can't support anyone's growth. I don't believe that. I just think there are parts of self-reflection that shouldn't be outsourced, and reasonable people will disagree about where that line is. This is where I landed after sitting with it for a long time.

Therapists learn early that meaningful change rarely comes from giving brilliant advice. It comes from asking good questions, staying curious, and creating the conditions for someone to discover something themselves. Therapy includes interpretation and feedback. But it also respects that another person's inner world is ultimately their own.

And I don't think our problem today is a lack of information. We have more accessible psychology than at any point in history, through books, podcasts, courses, and content. That's a good thing. My concern is that it has become much easier to consume psychological ideas than to actually engage with them. Insight isn't something we consume. It's something we cultivate, and cultivating is slower. It means wrestling with a question, noticing it show up in your life, and gradually responding differently long after the conversation has ended.

That's my hesitation with AI therapy chatbots. The interaction feels complete. You ask, it responds, it summarizes your thoughts, it identifies a pattern, it reassures you. The conversation feels finished, so the work feels finished. But in my experience the explanation is only the beginning of change, not the end of it.

I also worry about what gets handed over in the process. There is something deeply human about sitting with a question no one else can answer for you. Some questions can't be rushed. Some experiences shouldn't be immediately interpreted. Sometimes the discomfort of not knowing is exactly what lets a deeper understanding emerge later. As a therapist, I spend a surprising amount of my time helping people become more comfortable with uncertainty, not less. I'd hate to build a product that encouraged the opposite reflex, where every uncomfortable feeling gets met with one more explanation, one more reassuring response. Reassurance has its place. When it becomes the default answer to uncertainty, it quietly erodes people's confidence in their own ability to sit with difficult thoughts.

There were practical concerns too. AI chatbots are improving fast, but they can still confidently offer inaccurate interpretations, mishandle a crisis, or sound psychologically convincing without being clinically sound. And privacy matters to me. When people reflect honestly, they write about trauma, shame, grief, addiction, and things they've never told another person. I wanted those moments to stay as private as possible, with no AI analyzing them or generating inferences about them.

You can see this philosophy in how the app actually works. Ninefold's Path Archives feature gathers insights from reflections you've completed along a path. Instead of using AI to interpret your entries, it uses intentionally simple logic to resurface the themes and words you already wrote. The app isn't deciding what your experience means. It's helping you reconnect with your own words so you can notice the patterns yourself. Sometimes reading something you wrote six months ago reveals a pattern no AI could meaningfully find for you. Not because the technology isn't sophisticated enough, but because the significance lives in who you've become since you wrote it. You're seeing it with new eyes.

I don't know what place AI will ultimately have in mental health, and my own thinking will keep evolving. But every technology shapes how we relate to ourselves, and when I imagined the relationship I wanted people to have with Ninefold, I didn't want another voice interpreting their experience. My hope is that people who use it get a little more comfortable asking better questions, notice patterns they hadn't seen, and spend less time looking for someone or something to explain them and more time trusting their own capacity to understand themselves.

Ninefold was never meant to replace therapy, and it was never going to be another AI companion. I wanted to build something that's becoming rare: a quiet place where no one, human or machine, rushes to tell you who you are. Enough structure to support the work. Enough space to find your own answers.

 

Todd Gerson, LMHC  is a therapist in private practice in Oregon, and the creator of Ninefold, a guided self-reflection app. Learn more at ninefoldapp.com