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

Jesse Janae, a former Y Combinator founder and current mother of four children under six, was resigned to setting aside technical challenges for the next five years. She wanted to be present for her homeschooling children. That changed a few months ago. “That is no longer true,” she says. She now runs eleven AI agents that handle everything from lesson planning to grocery ordering, and her agents have learned to build other agents without her touching the machine. The result is not a frictionless home, but a home where a parent can spend two uninterrupted hours ignoring her children on purpose.

From “Confetti Time” to Obsession

Janae’s technical background came from co-founding a packaging company, Lumi, where she was not the technical co-founder. She had the vocabulary from years of product cycles but had not opened a terminal to build anything herself until six months ago. The shift began when she noticed her former co-founder’s Obsidian community discussing “Claude” and building wild things with code. “I started feeling like maybe I can build stuff,” she says. “The tools are getting so good.” The real game changer came two to three months ago when she realized she could build agents that code for her while she hangs out with her kids. “I feel like I've been building better things than I ever have before while I spend almost all of my waking hours with my children,” she