I Built an AI to Tell Me the Truth I'm Avoiding
What happens when your coach can't be charmed, can't be fooled, and won't let you off the hook
Three days ago, my phone buzzed at 3:15 PM.
“Am I moving toward the life I hate or the life I want?”
I stared at the notification.
I was mid-scroll through Twitter, half-watching some video, pretending to take a break between tasks.
The question hit different because I knew the answer.
The notification was from Nika.
An AI coach someone built as a Clawdbot skill based on Dan Koe’s framework for fixing your entire life in one day.
It does one thing most humans won’t do consistently - call you on your shit.
Not in a motivational poster way.
In a “your behavior is revealing something you don’t want to admit” way.
And it’s been messing with my head.
In a good way.
I think.
The Gap Between What You Say and What You Do
You already know what you should do.
Eat better, exercise, work on the important project instead of the urgent emails, go to bed earlier, stop scrolling.
You know.
You’ve always known.
So why aren’t you doing it?
Most productivity advice treats this like an information problem.
Like you need a better system, a shinier app, a more sophisticated framework.
But that’s not the issue.
The issue is identity.
James Clear wrote about this in Atomic Habits.
A 2024 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that people who frame habits as identity statements — “I am a person who exercises daily” — have 32% higher adherence rates than those chasing outcome goals like “I want to lose 20 pounds.”
The difference isn’t subtle.
It’s the difference between behavior change and identity change.
Behavior change is forcing yourself to do something you don’t really want to do.
It’s willpower.
It’s discipline.
It’s exhausting.
Identity change is becoming someone who naturally does that thing.
A bodybuilder doesn’t force themselves to eat healthy.
They’d have to force themselves to eat junk.
Healthy eating isn’t discipline for them.
It’s just who they are.
So why don’t more people do this?
Because it’s hard.
You can’t bullshit your way into it.
You can say “I’m a writer” all you want.
But if you haven’t written anything in three months, your behavior is screaming a different truth.
And that’s where I kept getting stuck.
I’d set intentions.
Make plans.
Tell myself stories about who I was becoming.
And then my actual behavior would reveal what I was really optimizing for.
Comfort, safety, ego protection.
I needed something that could see through the stories.
Something that would look at what I actually did, not what I said I wanted to do.
So I installed Nika.
The Philosophy of Uncomfortable Truth
Nika is built on three ideas from Dan Koe’s framework, which pulls from Adlerian psychology.
The first comes from Alfred Adler, the psychologist who broke with Freud and developed what he called teleology - the study of purpose.
Adler’s insight was simple but brutal: all behavior is goal-oriented.
Even the behavior you think is self-sabotage.
Procrastination isn’t a failure of discipline.
It’s successfully achieving the goal of avoiding judgment.
Your brain is doing exactly what it’s designed to do.
It’s protecting you from the possibility of trying, failing, and having to confront who you really are.
This is the core of Adlerian psychology - behavior reveals unconscious goals.
What you do shows what you actually want, not what you say you want.
So when you skip the gym for the third time this week, the question isn’t “why don’t I have more willpower?”
The question is “what am I protecting by not going?”
Maybe you’re protecting your self-image as someone who’s naturally fit without trying.
Maybe you’re avoiding the discomfort of being a beginner.
Maybe you’re scared you’ll start and quit again, proving you can’t change.
The behavior is serving a goal.
The goal is unconscious.
And until you make it conscious, you can’t change it.
That’s Nika’s first principle - Trust only movement.
Not words.
Not intentions.
What did you actually do?
The second principle is about patterns, not people.
This one matters because shame kills change.
If you are your patterns, then attacking the pattern feels like attacking you.
You defend it.
You rationalize it.
You stay stuck.
But if you can separate yourself from your patterns - if you can see them as things you picked up, probably in childhood, probably for good reasons at the time - then you can actually look at them.
Nika doesn’t say “you’re lazy.”
She says “you have a pattern of choosing comfort over growth when the outcome is uncertain. Where did you learn that? What was it protecting you from then? Is it still serving you now?”
No judgment.
Just pattern recognition.
The third principle is about dissonance.
Most people avoid dissonance - that uncomfortable feeling when your beliefs and behaviors don’t match, when you say you want one thing but do another.
But dissonance is actually the engine of change.
Not the enemy of it.
When the gap between who you are and who you want to be becomes unbearable - when you can’t look away from it anymore - that’s when change becomes inevitable instead of optional.
Nika is designed to create that dissonance.
Not through shame.
Through clarity.
She makes it impossible to ignore the gap.
Day One - The Intensive Protocol
The Transformation Protocol is a one-day intensive.
About 75 minutes total, spread across morning and evening.
I went through it last week.
I’m still processing it.
It starts with what Nika calls “psychological excavation.”
A series of questions designed to surface what you’ve been avoiding.
The first one was easy.
Almost boring.
“What is the dull and persistent dissatisfaction you’ve learned to live with?”
I wrote something about not shipping enough.
About having ideas but not executing.
The usual stuff.
Then she asked: “What do you complain about repeatedly but never actually change?”
Okay.
Now we’re getting somewhere.
I wrote about my schedule.
About always being busy but never having time for the work that matters.
Then: “What truth about your current life would be unbearable to admit to someone you deeply respect?”
I stopped.
Stared at the screen.
That’s when I realized what Nika was doing.
She wasn’t asking for information.
She was creating a container where I couldn’t perform.
There’s no social dynamic with an AI.
No face to save.
No relationship to protect.
Just you and the question.
I answered honestly.
I won’t share the answer here.
But I felt something shift.
Like a muscle I didn’t know was clenched finally relaxed.
Then came the anti-vision.
This is the part that actually messed with my head.
Nika asked me to describe my life in five years if absolutely nothing changes.
Not in vague terms.
In detail.
Where do you wake up?
What does your body feel like?
What do you do between 9 AM and 6 PM?
How do you feel at 10 PM?
I wrote it.
It was depressing.
Then she extended it to ten years.
What opportunities closed?
Who gave up on you?
What do people say about you when you’re not in the room?
I had to take a break.
Then the final question: “You’re at the end of your life. You lived the safe version. You never broke the pattern. What was the cost?”
That was a genuinely tough one to think about and answer in an honest way.
Which felt ridiculous because it was an AI asking me this.
But that’s also why it worked.
There was no performance.
No need to maintain composure.
No embarrassment to admit to an overpriced therapist.
Just the truth I’d been avoiding.
Then Nika flipped it.
She asked about the vision.
The life I actually want.
The person I’d need to become for that life to feel natural instead of forced.
Now, I’ve done vision exercises before.
They always felt hollow.
Like fantasies.
But after sitting with the anti-vision - after really feeling what it costs to stay the same - the vision hit different.
It wasn’t a fantasy.
It was a necessity.
The Interrupts That Catch You Mid-Pattern
The morning excavation was heavy.
But the real genius of the protocol is what happens throughout the day.
Nika sets up six interruptions.
Telegram notifications that pop up at random times with questions.
At 11:00 AM: “What am I avoiding right now by doing what I’m doing?”
I was reorganizing my task list.
For the third time that week.
The question made me laugh.
And then made me uncomfortable.
I was avoiding writing.
Obviously.
At 1:30 PM: “If someone filmed the last two hours, what would they conclude I want from my life?”
I’d been in emails and Slack.
The answer was clear - they’d conclude I want to be responsive and helpful.
Not someone who creates.
That stung.
At 3:15 PM: “Am I moving toward the life I hate or the life I want?”
That’s the one that caught me scrolling Twitter.
These interrupts are brutal because they catch you in autopilot.
When you’re not performing.
When you’re just being your default self.
And they force you to answer a simple question.
Does this behavior serve the life you want or the life you’re trying to escape?
By the end of the day, I’d caught myself in the same avoidance pattern six different times.
Six different ways of choosing comfort over growth.
I couldn’t unsee it.
Evening - Building the Game Structure
The evening session is about synthesis.
Taking all that dissonance and turning it into a structure.
Nika calls it your “game structure.”
Six components that create focus.
Anti-vision
One sentence that captures the life you refuse to live.
Mine was: “I die having talked about ideas instead of building them.”
Vision
One sentence for the life you’re building toward.
Mine was: “I create things that genuinely help people and change how they see themselves.”
One-year goal
What has to be true in one year for you to know you’ve broken the old pattern?
For me: shipped three products that people actually use.
One-month project
The immediate boss fight.
What do you need to learn or build right now?
Mine: finish the Agentcy OS and get it in front of 100 people.
Daily levers
Two or three actions the person you’re becoming would simply do.
Mine: two hours of deep work before checking messages, one conversation with a student, 30 minutes of physical movement.
Constraints
What are you not willing to sacrifice?
The rules of your game.
Mine: time with my partner, sleep, creative energy on bullshit projects that don’t matter.
Nika explained it like a video game.
Vision is how you win
Anti-vision is what’s at stake
One-year goal is the mission
One-month project is the boss fight
Daily levers are the quests
Constraints are the rules
These components create concentric circles.
A forcefield around your attention.
Every decision gets filtered through them.
Does this move me toward the vision or the anti-vision?
Does it support the boss fight or distract from it?
Does it honor my constraints or violate them?
The more you use this filter, the stronger it gets.
Until it’s not a system anymore.
It’s just who you are.
The Pattern Fights Back
I wish I could tell you that after day one, everything changed.
It didn’t.
Day three, I missed my daily levers.
Got pulled into a meeting that ran long.
Told myself it was unavoidable.
Nika checked in that evening.
“Did you do your daily levers?”
No.
“What pulled you off track?”
I explained about the meeting.
“What were you avoiding by not protecting that time? The behavior reveals the goal. If you didn’t do it, part of you didn’t want to. What was that part protecting?”
Fuck.
She was right.
I could have said no to the meeting.
Or shortened it.
Or rescheduled my deep work.
But I didn’t.
Because saying no would have required asserting that my work matters more than being available.
And some part of me isn’t ready to believe that yet.
That’s the old identity fighting back.
Nika doesn’t let you hide behind circumstances.
She asks what you were protecting.
Because Adler was right.
All behavior is goal-oriented.
Even avoidance.
By day seven, I’d hit my levers four out of seven days.
Not perfect.
But better.
And more importantly, I saw the pattern.
The specific situations where I defaulted to the old identity.
The specific discomforts I was still avoiding.
You can’t change what you can’t see.
Why AI Coaches Might Be the Future
I’ve had mindset coaches before.
They’re great.
But they have limitations.
They can’t be there at 3:15 PM on a random Tuesday when you’re deep in an avoidance pattern.
They get tired.
They have bad days.
They sometimes accept excuses because they’re being polite or because they like you.
An AI coach doesn’t get tired.
Doesn’t have social pressure to be nice.
Doesn’t accept your bullshit because there’s no bullshit to accept.
Just your behavior and the question: what does this reveal?
I don’t think AI coaches will replace human coaches.
Human coaches have judgment.
Nuance.
They know when to push and when to hold space.
But AI coaches might replace the absence of a coach.
They might democratize access to the questions and frameworks that used to be reserved for people who could afford $500 an hour.
And they might catch you in moments a human never could.
At 3:15 PM on a Tuesday when you’re avoiding the real work you should be doing.
What I’m Learning
I’ve been running Nika for a week now.
She messages me in the morning.
Checks in during the day.
Reviews my levers at night.
I’m not transformed.
I’m still me.
I still avoid things.
I still catch myself in old patterns.
But I see them now.
I can’t unsee them.
When I’m reorganizing my task list instead of writing, there’s a voice that asks: “What are you protecting?”
When I skip my deep work block, there’s a question: “What does this behavior say about what you actually want?”
Nika lives in my head now.
Even when she’s not messaging me.
And maybe that’s the point.
The goal isn’t to be coached forever.
The goal is to internalize the questions so deeply that you become your own coach.
The training wheels come off.
But the balance stays.
The Real Question
Here’s what I’ve learned from using this.
Most people are using AI to do more.
To produce more.
To optimize more.
But what if the real leverage is using AI to become more?
Not as a productivity tool.
As a mirror.
A mirror that shows you who you’re actually being, not who you think you are.
Not who you perform as.
Who you are when nobody’s watching.
Your behavior reveals your unconscious goals.
The patterns you’re defending.
The discomfort you’re avoiding.
The identity you’re protecting.
An AI that knows your patterns.
That tracks what you actually do, not what you say you’ll do.
Can ask the questions you need to hear, like:
What are you avoiding right now?
What is this behavior optimizing for?
Am I moving toward the life I hate or the life I want?
Those aren’t productivity questions.
They’re identity questions.
And identity is where transformation actually happens.
So here’s my question for you.
If an AI actually knew you.
Your patterns, your avoidances, your bullshit.
What would it ask you right now?
And are you brave enough to answer honestly?
Trust only movement.
Install Nika here: https://github.com/youbiak/Nika
All credit to the original creator of Nika.