What It Means to Attend
The AI prayer problem
The most obvious version of the Noble critique for a faith tech product is the AI prayer generator. You provide your circumstances, and the app produces a personalized prayer.
This is technically impressive. Theologically, it is the wrong move. The value of prayer is not in the quality of the text produced. It is in the act of attending: bringing your actual self, with its confusion and distraction and reluctance, into the presence of God. The moment you outsource the production of the prayer, you have also outsourced the attendance. Formation requires that you actually show up. You cannot be formed by proxy.
I pulled this feature before it shipped.
Presence as the design goal
Noble's critique of platforms is that they simulate attentiveness: they make users feel noticed and personally addressed in ways that generate engagement without requiring genuine relationship. The problem is not that these features don't work. It is that they work too well at the wrong thing. They give you the feeling of being known without the substance of being known.
The formation tool that takes Noble seriously is not trying to compete with platforms that offer simulated attention. It is trying to create conditions for genuine attention — which means being willing to ask more of the user rather than less. Building silence into the design. Not doing things for users that they are supposed to do themselves.
This makes for an awkward product. By the metrics app stores reward, it deliberately underperforms. The goal is not to maximize time spent with the app. The goal is to be genuinely useful in as short a window as possible and then step out of the way.
Noble ends his essay by noting that the deepest problem with digital substitutes is that they make us less capable of giving and receiving the real thing: they train inattention, and inattention degrades the very capacity for genuine presence we needed to have met in the first place.
This brings me to what I think is the real design obligation — one that goes beyond individual product decisions. If we are beings made for communion, then an app that positions itself as a companion, a listener, or a substitute for community is not neutral. It is actively working against what humans most need. The question is not just whether your tool exploits the user's hunger for attention. It is whether, over time, it draws them toward genuine relationship or quietly trains them away from it.
This is a moral claim, not just a UX preference. The designer of a formation tool carries an obligation to build something that is honest about what it is and what it cannot do. It can prompt. It can create conditions. It can get out of the way. But it cannot attend. It cannot know you. It cannot be the community your soul actually needs.
The tools we build should reflect that limitation plainly — and should actively point users back toward the people and practices that can meet what the app cannot. Not as a feature. As a conviction.
Trent Jones is a software builder in Fort Collins, Colorado. He is the founder of Reflect, a daily reflection practice for living in the present, in peace, with joy.
