Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect

I was resigned to not challenging myself to build technical or hard things for, like, the next five years or so. I really wanna 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 actually 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 want an average person to go through. But the thing is In the nineteen fifties, 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 frictionless home. It is a home where a parent can spend two uninterrupted hours ignoring her children on purpose because she believes boredom is a skill worth teaching. Catherine Boyle and Sarah Wang speak with Jesse Janae, startup builder turned family builder. 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. God bless you. 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 of different tasks around supporting your family as a homeschool mom. 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 …