30 Minutes, 100+ Clicks, No AI: The Rise of the Digital Ritual

In the tech world right now, everyone is rushing to add Artificial Intelligence (AI) to their products. The promise is always the same: "It is faster. It is smarter. It does the work for you."

When I built Cast I Ching, I had a choice. Should I add a chatbot to interpret the Hexagrams? Should I make it "instant"?

I chose to stick to the authentic ways: The difficult math of the traditional Yarrow Stalk ritual, and the classic Wilhelm/Baynes translation. No AI, just code and probability.

But I was worried. In 2025, does anyone still have the patience for a slow, manual process?

The "Anomaly" in the Data

Yesterday, while reviewing our anonymous usage metrics, I noticed a statistical outlier.

In the world of mobile apps and short attention spans, the average session usually lasts less than a minute. Users tap, glance, and leave.

But one data point stood out like a sore thumb.

There was a single, anonymous session that lasted for over 30 minutes.

At first, I thought it was a glitch—maybe a user left the tab open in the background. We call this "idle time." But the analytics told a different story.

The active engagement metric was high. The user wasn't idle. They were interacting with the interface continuously, rhythmically, for half an hour.

They were using the Manual Yarrow Stalk method.

Because this method requires a specific number of steps to generate each line, we could deduce from the duration that this person had patiently clicked the mouse over 100+ times to build their Hexagram.

I initially thought it was a bot getting stuck in a loop. But it wasn't. It was a digital ritual.

"Please Don't Add AI"

Why do people do this? Why choose the hard way?

I got the answer from a user feedback message I received this morning. It was short, but it explained everything.

This message hit me hard. It made me realize a simple truth about the I Ching.

When we ask the Oracle for advice, we want truth, not "hallucinations."

Generative AI (like ChatGPT) is designed to be creative. It predicts the next word to make a sentence sound good. Sometimes, it makes things up.

But the best I Ching experience is based on Chance and Synchronicity. It relies on the precise mathematics of probability to ensure accurate results.

AI tries to be smart by guessing what you want to hear.

The Yarrow Stalk algorithm (which we use) is "dumb" but honest. It strictly follows the math to give you the Hexagram you are meant to see.

Our Promise

To the users who spent 30 minutes on my site yesterday: Thank you. You proved that the ritual matters.

We hear your feedback loud and clear.

So, here is our commitment to you: The "Cast" will never be AI.

We guarantee that the Hexagram generation process will always remain strictly mathematical (using the Box-Muller algorithm) and governed by the laws of probability. We will never let a chatbot "invent" or "hallucinate" your result.

We believe that technology should serve the ritual, not replace it. Whether you click 6 times or 100+ times, the answer you get comes from the math, not a model.