From Kitchen Table Ministry to Agentic AI-Powered Platform
How a Husband-Wife Team Built the Future of Catholic Dating with Vibe Coding
Part 1: Blog Series
Building Game of Love — An AI-Powered Catholic Dating & Marriage Discernment Platform
A 3-part series by Michael Palitto, CTO & Co-Founder, Finding Adam Finding Eve Ministry
There’s a moment every ministry leader dreads. My wife Katie — M.A. in psychology from Divine Mercy University, certified life coach, certified prayer companion, over ten years mentoring young adults through the chaos of modern dating — was staring at a whiteboard covered in her frameworks. Temperament pairings. Attachment wound patterns. The virtues she kept circling back to in every pre-engagement session. “I can only meet with so many people,” she said. “And they need this at 11 PM on a Tuesday, not at our next appointment.”
That’s the sentence that launched Game of Love.
The Problem We Couldn’t Ignore
Katie had spent years sitting across from couples and singles, walking them through the hard questions: Do you know yourself well enough to give yourself to another person? Can you name your wounds? Have you confused emotional intensity for authentic love? Her thesis and guidance is founded in synthesis of her training and schooling from Devine Mercy University where she was introduced to the rigorous framework called the Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person (CCMMP) — that integrates three disciplines most people treat as separate worlds: empirical psychology, Christian philosophy, and Catholic theology. It sees the human person through eleven dimensions — from our created goodness to our fallen wounds to our redeemed potential, from our emotional and rational capacities to our vocation and freedom.
This isn’t pop psychology with a prayer tacked on. The CCMMP is the intellectual backbone of our ministry and is the guiding principals behind linking modern psychology with the Catholic view of the human person as laid in the work at Devine Mercy and particular faculty that published the CCMP. When Katie assesses someone’s attachment style, she’s not just applying modern psychology and cultural patterns. She’s reading that attachment pattern through the lens of our fallen and redeemed nature — seeing the wound and the path to healing simultaneously. When she evaluates a couple’s readiness for marriage, she’s not running a compatibility quiz. She’s examining whether two people have the virtue, freedom, and self-possession to make a total gift of self.
It worked. Couples who went through her process went into engagement with eyes open. But ministry doesn’t scale the way a SaaS product does. Katie could see maybe 10-15 people a week. The waitlist grew. The need was massive.
Enter Vibe Coding
I’m not a software engineer by training. I’m a technologist who can learn fast and build faster. When Claude and other AI coding assistants matured in 2024, I saw the opportunity: What if I could build a production-grade platform — not a prototype, not a toy — using AI as my pair programmer?
That’s exactly what we did. The entire Game of Love codebase — a Next.js frontend, a FastAPI backend deployed on Railway, a Weaviate vector database holding nearly 12,000 chunks of Catholic teaching — was built through what’s now called “vibe coding.” AI didn’t replace engineering judgment. It amplified it. I architected the systems, made the design decisions, debugged the hairy problems. Claude wrote the code at the speed of conversation.
The numbers tell the story:
410+ assessment questions across five comprehensive assessments, each grounded in CCMMP dimensions with Church teaching citations
500+ AI-generated quiz questions spanning 11 Catholic knowledge categories at 5 difficulty tiers
~1,600 lines of prompt engineering that give our AI coach “Katie” her voice, her judgment, her pastoral sensitivity
A RAG knowledge base with 11,918 indexed chunks from the Catechism, Theology of the Body, the Summa Theologiae, Bible, Canon Law, papal encyclicals, the CCMMP itself, and Katie’s own ministry content
358 metro areas covered by our Sunday Group Date meetup system
A dating discernment toolkit (Post-Date Assessment + My Date) that walks users from first dates through relationship decisions
The whole stack — frontend, backend, AI orchestration, vector database, payment system, gamification engine — is managed by one person. Me. With AI.
Why Vibe Coding Works for Ministry
Here’s what the tech world doesn’t always understand about building for a mission-driven audience: your users need to trust you deeply, and your content needs to be theologically precise. One sloppy prompt, one poorly framed assessment question, one off-hand AI response that contradicts Church teaching — and you’ve lost credibility you can never get back.
This is exactly why the CCMMP matters so much to what we’ve built. Public AI models — ChatGPT, Gemini, whatever comes next — will happily give dating advice. But they have no anthropological framework. They don’t know that the human person is a body-soul unity ordered toward self-gift. They can’t distinguish between emotional attachment and authentic love. They’ll optimize for your feelings when what you need is virtue.
The Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person© gives our AI something no public model has: a coherent, integrated vision of who the human person is and what they’re made for. Every prompt, every assessment, every coaching response flows from that vision. That’s what makes Game of Love fundamentally different from asking ChatGPT for relationship advice.
Vibe coding gave me the velocity to build fast and the oversight to build carefully. Every AI-generated code block got reviewed through the lens of: Does this serve Katie’s pastoral vision? Does this respect the dignity of the person? Is this theologically sound?
More Than an App: A Next-Generation Remote Marriage Preparation Platform
Game of Love isn’t a dating app. It’s not one feature. It’s a next-generation remote marriage preparation platform that bridges the digital and the physical — because the mystery of love ultimately unfolds in person.
Here’s what’s inside:
KNOW — A flagship self-discovery assessment combining four psychological frameworks (temperament, love languages, attachment style, cardinal virtues) into a unified “Catholic Relationship Profile” synthesized by AI through the CCMMP lens
READY — A 115+ question readiness assessment for singles that surfaces hidden blockers — unresolved wounds, spiritual immaturity, impediments to freedom — with Katie AI providing personalized growth guidance
GIFT — A 140-question couples pre-engagement assessment with real-time red flag detection, formation opportunity flagging, and a generated PDF workbook for facilitated conversations with your priest or mentor couple
Post-Date Assessment (PDA) — A structured reflection tool for evaluating individual dates: Were virtues present? Did you feel safe? Was faith evident? Were boundaries respected? Katie AI analyzes each date and detects patterns across multiple dates with the same person — tracking whether curiosity deepens, red flags persist, or green flags grow
My Date — For exclusive relationships, an ongoing discernment dashboard with periodic check-ins that track trust, communication, faith life, and safety over time. The system maintains full relationship history and — when you’re ready — connects your PDA history to your ongoing relationship analysis
GROW — An AI-powered Catholic learning platform with 500+ questions across 11 knowledge categories, from Scripture to Sacraments, using Bloom’s taxonomy for cognitive difficulty progression
Katie AI — A 24/7 AI dating coach grounded in the CCMMP and Catholic wisdom, drawing from the RAG knowledge base to give real-time guidance
Sunday Group Date — Free post-Mass meetups for Catholic singles in 358 metro areas across the United States, with a featured parish in each metro selected for young adult friendliness. Enter your zip code, find your parish, RSVP, show up after Mass on the first Sunday. That simple.
Live Coaching — Because AI extends ministry but doesn’t replace it. Users can book a complimentary 30-minute consultation with Katie directly — a real, certified Catholic dating coach. Dating coaching, life coaching, couples coaching, or deep-dive sessions on assessment results. In person in Kansas City or virtual anywhere.
That last point matters more than any technology we’ve built. Game of Love gives users access to a real certified dating coach anytime they need one. The platform isn’t a replacement for human relationship — it’s the bridge that connects the digital tools to the physical encounter where grace actually moves.
What Comes Next
In Part 2 of this series, we’ll go deep into how we built Katie AI — the coaching engine at the heart of Game of Love — and how the CCMMP framework along with the time tested teachings of the Catholic Magesterium through its many encyclicals and years of ministry content production makes her responses categorically different from any public AI model. And in Part 3, we’ll talk about our ThinkTank content system, the GROW learning platform, and how two people and an AI power workshops, a blog, and a nationwide community of Catholic singles.
But the headline is this: a husband-wife team built a platform that gives the Catholic dating world something it’s never had — an always-available, theologically grounded, psychologically rigorous companion for the journey toward marriage. Not just online. From screen to parish hall. From AI coaching to a real conversation with Katie over coffee.
Katie still meets with people one-on-one. She always will. But now, at 11 PM on a Tuesday, when someone is sitting in their car after a bad date wondering if something is wrong with them — Katie is there too. And on the first Sunday of the month, a parish in their city is waiting for them to walk through the door.
Part 2: Teaching AI to Think Like a Catholic
Part 3: The Engine Behind the Ministry
In Service,
Mike Palitto, CTO
Finding Adam Finding Eve
Developer of the Game of Love App