Why I'm starting a newsletter about AI for families

Between the panic and the hype, a third option — from a parent who also builds this stuff.

Most of what I read about parenting and AI makes me feel worse and helps me less.

One week it’s a headline telling me AI is quietly dismantling my kids’ ability to think. The next it’s someone promising that an AI tutor will fix everything school got wrong. Both can’t be right, and honestly, neither matches what I actually see at my own kitchen table.

So I’m writing the thing I kept looking for and couldn’t find.

Here’s where I’m coming from. I’ve spent 20-plus years in tech, from Intel to AMD, building the security that sits underneath the systems all of this AI now runs on — the deep, unglamorous infrastructure meant to keep it from failing in ways you’d never see coming. I’m not telling you that to flash a badge. I’m telling you because it’s why I’m hard to sell to and slow to panic: I spend my days looking at how these systems actually break, instead of how the demo says they work.

And I’m a parent. One of my kids used these tools to start and run a small service business before he was old enough to drive. I watched that happen up close — what the AI did, what he did, where it helped, and the exact moment it would have led him off a cliff if no one were paying attention.

That combination — someone who knows what’s under the hood and is living the parenting version of this in real time — turns out to be rare. Most of the loud voices have one half or the other. The technologists don’t have a teenager negotiating with a chatbot at 11pm. The parenting writers haven’t seen how the machine actually works. I keep ending up in the gap between them, and that gap is where I want to write from.

What this newsletter is actually about

Here’s the part most parenting-and-AI content gets backwards. It treats you, the parent, as a gatekeeper — someone whose job is to set limits on a thing you’re standing outside of. I don’t think that works. You can’t usefully guide your kid through something you’ve never genuinely used yourself. The parents I trust most on this aren’t the ones with the strictest rules. They’re the ones who’ve built real fluency of their own, and parent from there.

So this covers three things, in this order:

1. How you can actually use AI in your own life. Before anything about your kids — the boring, high-leverage stuff. Drafting the hard email to the teacher when you’re too angry to write it well. Getting your head around a medical question at midnight without three hours of bad search results. Thinking through a real decision out loud with something that pushes back. If you build this muscle for yourself, everything downstream gets easier.

2. How a family can use AI together. Side by side, out loud, with the kids watching how you handle it — when you trust it, when you double-check it, when you walk away. That modeling does more than any rule you’ll ever post on the fridge.

3. How to raise kids who are capable with it, not dependent on it. The part everyone else leads with — but grounded in how the technology really behaves, not in vibes or fear.

What you’ll get, and what you won’t

One essay a week, mid-week. Long enough to actually say something — eight or ten minutes to read — and short enough to finish. Now and then a quick note in between when I notice something worth flagging. Every so often, an honest write-up of what my own kid is building and what it’s teaching both of us.

What you won’t get: listicles, breathless tool roundups, affiliate links dressed up as advice, or anything written by a machine. I write all of this myself. That’s sort of the whole point.

And when I don’t know something — which happens — I’ll say so plainly instead of performing certainty. The defaults in this space are hype and dread. I’m trying to hold a third position: take the technology seriously, take parenting seriously, and treat you as an adult who can form your own view.

The honest version of the deal

I’m not going to pretend I have this fully solved. Nobody does — the ground is moving too fast, and anyone who tells you they’ve got a tidy framework for all of it is selling something. What I do have is a particular vantage point, a kid who’s been my unintentional test case, and a strong allergy to both the panic and the hype.

If that sounds like the conversation you’ve been wanting to have, subscribe below and the next one will land in your inbox. There’s also a small community of parents working through this stuff in real time, for anyone who wants to go further than a once-a-week essay — but that’s entirely optional, and the newsletter stands on its own.

Either way: I’m glad you’re here. Let’s figure this out like the grown-ups in the room.

— Peter