Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect
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I was resigned to not challenging myself to build technical or hard things for like the next five years or so. I really want to be present with my kids. I need to take this break, basically. That is no longer true. A weird superpower of mine is just how incredibly motivated I am for agents to do work for me. I got my agents to learn how to build other agents on their own. So I could be like, we need another agent in you guys, and they can spin them up without me touching the machine, which is a little crazy. But the first few weeks were very rough. It would be a level of pain that I wouldn't w
In the 1950s, labor saving appliances were supposed to give mothers more free time. Instead, standards rose to fill the gap. Laundry went from weekly to daily. Meals became more elaborate. The hours stayed the same. Seven decades later, a former YC founder homeschooling four children under six, decided to test whether AI agents could actually break that cycle. She built 11 agents, each with a distinct role, from lesson planning to grocery ordering to logging her children's progress via voice notes. Her agents now build other agents without her touching the machine. The result is not a friction
Jesse, it is so fantastic to have you here. I think you've been what I would call a viral sensation on X, posting videos of how you're homeschooling your family for children under the age of five, which all I can say is God bless you. You're amazing. But we also want your secrets. We want your tips. Sarah and I are both moms of young children, and we talk a lot about how AI is impacting education, how AI is impacting the future of the family. And you've become just such an incredible force with your videos on X of how you're using it in a bunch of different tasks around the house and a bunch o
Yeah.
So we wanna start with who you are and how you got so interested in using AI for homeschool. But tell us about your previous career, too, as a Silicon Valley founder.
Yeah. So I started a company many years ago. Now time flies, but I was a YC founder, did a venture backed company kind of full cycle. I ended up selling it a few years ago. And so I do on the one hand, I'd say I have a technical background. On the other hand, I would admit openly that my cofounder was the technical cofounder. So I wanna be like I want people to understand, yes, I've been swimming in these waters. I've sat in many an engineering meeting where I was sort of following along and sort of lost. I've sat in many product cycles and reviews. So it gives me a vocabulary, but I hadn't op
Yeah. And maybe talk about that six month, like, what was the thing that happened six months ago? Or do you remember what the moment was where you're like, I need to start building to fix this problem? Or what was the story behind
Well, my co founder from Lumi, which was a packaging company, so literally physical packaging, we managed a packaging marketplace. He's now off running something called Obsidian, and it's a markdown note taking app. And I say this because I follow him on Twitter. Obviously, we're cofounders. And then I follow all these Obsidian geeks on Twitter. And I started noticing a change in the conversation. Change in the conversation, them talking about how they were, like, building really wild things with Cloud Code. That stuff was referenced. The discussion about interesting ways they started using Ob
So that's incredibly inspiring what you just said. And I think a lot of parents listening to this are like, I don't have time to build this. Right? And so you're a mom four, five, and under. Yeah. I
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