Coder by Calling

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When I tell people I’m a software developer working on Bible translation software, most people inevitably ask, “How is AI affecting what you do?”

I was a bit apprehensive about using AI at first, but I’ve come to see it as a valuable tool for saving time and reducing repetitive work. Throughout my career, I’ve seen tools evolve to take care of more of the tedious details of writing software, allowing developers to focus on solving problems.

When I started as a software developer, we used plain text editors. I had to be careful to get the code right, and I did much of the work myself. Over time, editors became more sophisticated. They learned to recognize the programming language I was using and could help me work with the functions and libraries available. I still had to research which libraries to use and figure out how to use them, but these tools made the job easier. The changes came gradually, each one helping me work a little more efficiently.

Each of these changes made me a little more productive, but AI feels different. Rather than simply helping me write code more efficiently, it allows me to hand off tasks that I would previously have had to figure out and do myself. It opens up new possibilities for how I approach my work.

My work involves much more than just writing code. Because we have a small team, I wear many hats—taking on tasks that might be handled by several different people on a larger team. AI gives me a way to delegate some of the more routine work so I can focus on solving the problems that matter most to our mission of making Scripture available to people in their own languages.

Here’s one example.

Whenever we release a new version of our software, we have a series of steps to complete for each platform we support: Windows, macOS, and Linux. Two summers ago, we had a student project to revamp how we package our Linux software for distribution through Flathub, making it possible to run on a wide range of Linux distributions. The new approach worked, but releasing updates still involved quite a few manual steps.

While preparing our 14.7 release this week, I decided to describe the existing process to Claude, an AI assistant, and asked how I could improve it. Within an hour, I had an automated workflow that detects changes to our source code and creates new Linux installers when a release is tagged.

That’s a big improvement! What had been a manual process is now automated, saving time with each release. Just as importantly, the process is no longer dependent on me being available. Other members of the team can handle releases without having to learn all the details of the packaging process.
This is just one example of how AI is becoming part of our day-to-day work. It helps us spend less time on repetitive tasks and more time building and improving the tools that support Bible translation.

In future articles, I’ll share more examples of how AI is helping us write software and how we are using it within the Scripture apps.

This article originally appeared in our newsletter, which we publish 3–4 times a year. Sign up to receive future updates directly in your inbox!

Chris works on two products: Scripture App Builder (SAB) and Scriptoria. When we started developing SAB, we knew that helping organizations create contextualized Bible apps could eventually mean supporting thousands of apps. After all, there are more than 7,000 languages in the world! (Read more about apps in thousands of languages.)

Android is the primary smartphone platform for many of the communities we serve, but it changes every year. A Bible app created ten years ago still needs regular updates to keep working on the phones people use today. With thousands of apps in use, keeping them all up to date is a significant challenge.

Our first App Publishing Service focused on publishing apps through the Wycliffe USA Google Play Store. Later, we received funding to develop Scriptoria, which allows Bible translation organizations to keep their apps updated and available to their communities. This has become even more important as Google Play limits the availability of older apps on devices running newer versions of Android.

Each year, we release a new version of SAB that incorporates the latest Android libraries and other updates. All those apps need to be rebuilt and republished so that people can continue using them. Scriptoria makes that process much more manageable for the organizations responsible for these apps.

When we started Scriptoria, we didn’t have any web developers on our team, so we contracted outside developers to build it. Over time, improving Scriptoria became challenging. We needed to address some significant design flaws and performance problems, and we had learned a lot about web development while building our Scripture Progressive Web App (PWA). We decided it was time to modernize Scriptoria using the same technology stack—Svelte and DaisyUI—that we use for the PWA.

We released Scriptoria 2 at the end of 2025 (read the announcement). The new technology stack has made it much easier for us to maintain and improve the application. Since Aidan Jones joined our team, we’ve made many improvements. We also feel much more comfortable having students contribute to the project.

During the 2025–2026 school year, we worked with a Liberty University Capstone team to deliver two major improvements that we had wanted to make for years. It’s exciting to see how the new foundation is making it easier to tackle long-standing needs and continue improving Scriptoria.

Most importantly, Scriptoria is helping Bible translation organizations keep their apps up to date and available to the people who need them. Since 2019, it has been used to manage 3,255 projects, encompassing 5,999 products across 2,124 languages. During that time, those projects have resulted in 30,101 app publications.

Thank you for your support in making this work possible! Your support helps us maintain the tools that Bible translation organizations need to share God’s Word through technology.

    This has been an extremely busy year working on Scripture App Builder. Chris and his team have been working on the new Progressive Web App (PWA) template for two years. They released the new PWA in SAB 11.2 in March of 2024! However, there were still many missing features. This past summer, they had hoped for 1 or 2 interns to help them with the work. God blessed them with 6 interns to work on implementing these features. One of the interns was Mikayla, our daughter, who is studying Coding: App Development. It was such a joy for Chris to work with her this summer. Thank you for your continuing prayers for our team.

   It’s not enough to translate the Bible; it’s not enough to distribute the Bible. Our desire is to see real Scripture Engagement: people encountering God’s Word in life-changing ways. 
    Scripture App Builder (SAB) is a tool for Bible translators and language workers to provide Scripture in a format that best meets the needs of the community and helps them engage with the Scripture. One of the challenges for new believers is how can they study the Bible and do that in community?
    We have introduced an EXPERIMENTAL feature in SAB 12.0 which allows the person building the app to enable an AI Assistant by providing some predefined tasks that the end user can perform on a whole chapter or selected verses. Here are some example tasks:

• “Give me some Bible study questions”
• “Share some devotional thoughts”
• “Suggest ways to apply this to my life”
• “Explain some key Greek or Hebrew words”
• “Give me an outline of a talk”
• “Write a poem”
• “Show me the main points and structure of this passage”
• “Tell me about the cultural, historical and geographical context”
• “Show how this passage fits into the message of the book”

     When the user selects one of these tasks, the app will connect to a configured AI provider. It tells the AI the role it should play and the format of the responses it is looking for: “You are a helpful Christian assistant who believes in the reliability of the Bible, the importance of following Jesus as Saviour and Lord…” It then asks the AI service a question such as “Look at Mark chapter 8 in the Bible and write six discovery-style study questions which can be used in a participatory Bible study group.” The app writes the streamed response to the screen with a disclaimer at the end stating that the answer was generated by an AI assistant and to use its responses with discernment.
    What do you think? Would you like to try this out yourself? Contact Chris, and he will get you access to a beta of an app.