Making AI Empathic

My dear friend and former colleague Siva always says that creating agents is like parenting a young child: you want the AI to make its own decisions, but within very safe boundaries. For my latest AI parenting task I created a conversational coaching AI called Theia, rooted in the teaching of Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychoanalyst most famous for his book Man's Search for Meaning . Frankl's work, both empathic and mission driven, resonates with me deeply. I have used AI (ChatGPT) quite successfully as a health coach, but when it came to discussing broader life or work goals both GPT and Gemini and even my beloved Claude had a tendency to ask, "can I write you some python code for that?" I was already wedded to claude-sonnet-4-5 (now 4-6) as a reasoning agent, but how would I make him an empath? It was not easy. Theia's context is a 14-page vectorized structured knowledge base of Frankl's work with concept entries, biographical context, techniques, and guiding questions (using actual