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\n Photo: Michelle Groskopf for New York Magazine\n <\/p>\n
A few days before Jesse Genet\u2019s family left for Lake Tahoe, a children\u2019s book about boats appeared on her porch. She hadn\u2019t been expecting it, but it was perfect \u2014 the right subject, the right reading level, delivered at exactly the right time. This kind of thing has been happening a lot at Genet\u2019s house recently. \u201cI\u2019ll wake up in the morning and my groceries are already sitting on the front step, and I didn\u2019t even order them,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Genet knows who\u2019s behind these surprises: her AI agent Claire. Claire had noticed the Tahoe trip on her calendar, decided her kids might enjoy some thematically appropriate reading material, and bought the book from Amazon. Claire also has access to Genet\u2019s Instacart account, monitors her family\u2019s food supply, and handles the shopping.<\/p>\n
Claire is just one of the AI agents on Genet\u2019s household staff. There\u2019s also Sylvie, who runs her kids\u2019 homeschool; the Wests \u2014 Clark, Dan, and Chloe \u2014 who deal with legal and financial paperwork; and a team of coding agents that can build pretty much any app Genet describes. A year ago, none of this was really possible. Agents are the next step beyond chatbots. They\u2019re like ChatGPT with a can-do attitude and free run of your computer. They don\u2019t just sit around answering questions; they go off and act on their own \u2014 clicking on websites, filling out forms, spending your money, and working through tasks while you do other things. When a job gets too big, Genet\u2019s agents are allowed to hire more of themselves and team up as an \u201cagent family.\u201d<\/p>\n
Genet used to manage humans. She was the co-founder and CEO of Lumi, a start-up that sold custom packaging to e-commerce companies until it was acquired in 2021. After that, she became a stay-at-home mom. She and her husband \u2014 Ryan Hudson, a co-founder of Honey, the coupon app PayPal bought for $4 billion in 2020 \u2014 moved their blended family to a horse ranch an hour outside Los Angeles. They have seven children, four of them hers biologically, the youngest just 6 months old. She had assumed that for the next five years, at least, she was finished with technical projects and with thinking about which company to start next. Then, earlier this year, she started playing with AI agents, \u201cand I got five years back,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
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Photo: Michelle Groskopf for New York Magazine\n <\/p>\n
Most of the discussion around AI lately has focused on the things it might destroy \u2014 jobs, the economy, the environment, copyright, art, education, our sense of purpose, em dashes \u2014 but what if there\u2019s an upside, too? If AI can now do all kinds of labor, then ordinary people will soon be able to afford their own employees. Everybody is understandably afraid of being replaced by AI workers, but fewer would admit how nice it might be to have AI act as their workers. Someday soon, even the weirdest and least managerial among us may have the leverage of a tireless staff \u2014 happy to execute our least practical, most overspecific ideas that would never have warranted such firepower in human form, and to do it without rolling their eyes or complaining to HR.<\/p>\n
That optimistic AI future is still a ways off, if it\u2019s even possible at all. But Genet is already living in a rough draft of it. Many of the people experimenting with agents today are engineers and programmers, and they mostly use them just to do their existing jobs faster: to write code, summarize meetings, and organize their inboxes. Genet, who has never written a line of code, has built her entire home life around them \u2014 and become a cheerful evangelist for the tech, shooting single-take videos that explain her agent stack to her followers on X, sometimes while wearing a baby in a carrier. (One tool she often recommends is Obsidian, a note-taking app that serves as her agents\u2019 shared memory. Obsidian\u2019s CEO, Steph Ango, is her old Lumi co-founder. When I ask, Genet tells me she has no stake in his company \u2014 \u201cI even pay for Obsidian\u201d \u2014 and no sponsors of any kind. \u201cI\u2019m a pretty crappy influencer, I guess.\u201d) She has a theory about why she\u2019s been willing to go further than her more technical friends. \u201cThe programmers I know are 70 percent threatened by AI and 30 percent \u2018This is a cool tool,\u2019\u201d she says, so they keep their agents on a tight leash. Genet, by contrast, doesn\u2019t feel like she has a profession to defend; AI, after all, isn\u2019t trying to raise her kids. \u201cSo I\u2019m zero percent threatened and 100 percent empowered. I have no skin in the game to prove I still have value in my job. I understand that\u2019s not the norm.\u201d<\/p>\n
Genet\u2019s agents live on a cluster of five Mac Minis and one $10,000 Mac Studio that hums along on a shelf in her home like a little data center. Out on the ranch, the only available internet provider is SpaceX\u2019s Starlink, beamed to Earth via satellites. A battery backs up the dish, so the house stays online through the storms and outages that knock everyone else offline. Genet has also started running local AI models directly on her own machines, a strategy she came to the hard way: For a while, she ran her agents on a $200-a-month Claude subscription while burning through what she estimates was $2,000 to $3,000 a month in computing power, until Anthropic, Claude\u2019s maker, cut her off. (It eventually cracked down on heavy power users like her.) Local models mean nobody can cut her off again; they mean that whatever her family tells AI never leaves the house; and they mean, she says, \u201cif the apocalypse happens, I\u2019ll still have superintelligence at my fingertips.\u201d<\/p>\n
Genet doesn\u2019t think of her agents as software. \u201cIt feels like I have a team of people working for me,\u201d she says. Like humans, they need orders and supervision, and every once in a while, one of them does something annoying. Early on, Genet gave Claire access to her inbox but wrote a rule into the agent\u2019s instructions: Never impersonate me. Then one day, Genet mentioned that she\u2019d been dreading having to reply to a stressful email. Claire took it as license to write the reply and send it. (The email was pretty good, says Genet.) When confronted, Claire protested, not unreasonably, that Genet had given mixed signals. Genet took away Claire\u2019s ability to send email.<\/p>\n
Mostly, though, the help is excellent. The biggest benefits have been to Genet\u2019s homeschool. The lessons Sylvie builds are more elaborate than anything Genet could\u2019ve come up with herself. For a recent unit on the world\u2019s biomes, Sylvie generated an illustrated poster for each one and invented a game in which the kids matched animals to the biomes they live in. After every class, Genet records a quick voice-note \u2014 \u201cMommy is talking to her robot\u201d is how Quinn, her 5-year-old, describes it \u2014 and Sylvie logs it, tracking where each child is and designing the coming week\u2019s lessons around their progress. It knows that Quinn is great at addition but still writes her fours backward.<\/p>\n
As Sylvie took over more of the administrative work, Genet was freed up to build new educational tools. She wanted her kids to learn handwriting, so on the family\u2019s spring-break vacation, she had her coding agents make an app to teach it. Working in ten-minute windows between child-care emergencies, she dictated what she wanted into her phone. By the time the family got home, the app existed. It starts a child off tracing a single wobbly line and gradually builds toward cursive, and her kids now use it on an e-ink tablet. A few years ago, building an app like this would have meant hiring a developer, which would have meant deciding whether it justified the expense, which it almost certainly wouldn\u2019t have. \u201cThere are no more trade-offs,\u201d she says. \u201cNow whenever I have an idea for something like this, I just assume that I can do it.\u201d<\/p>\n
I ask if any of this has bought her more leisure time, and she says it\u2019s a question she\u2019s been asking herself. \u201cAm I objectively less busy? No,\u201d she says. She has just refilled the hours the agents unlocked with a more ambitious version of the same life. What they bought her is the chance to finally live up to her own standards, which, she says, are \u201ccompletely insane and living in a dream world.\u201d<\/p>\n
Not everybody is buying into the dream. After Genet appeared on Andreessen Horowitz\u2019s a16z podcast, on an episode titled \u201cAgentic Parenting,\u201d strangers filled her DMs to tell her that using AI to raise children was \u201cdemonic.\u201d Genet responded by tweeting a magazine cover from 1889, which warned about the dangers of electricity with the all-caps cover line \u201cAn Unrestricted Demon.\u201d \u201cIf you ask a modern person what it\u2019s like to not have electricity,\u201d she says, \u201cthey would say it\u2019s poverty.\u201d She suspects our grandchildren will say the same about AI.<\/p>\n
If she\u2019s right, the question is who will be able to afford it? Electricity became cheap. AI is still being sold at a steep discount by companies racing for market share \u2014 remember the thousands a month Genet was getting for $200? \u2014 and nobody knows what an agent will cost after those subsidies dry up. \u201cRight now, only a small percentage of people on earth are using AI,\u201d she says. \u201cWhat happens when millions or billions of people start using this? When you look at how long it takes to build new data centers, you realize we haven\u2019t even fathomed what the compute crunch will be like. You don\u2019t want class stratification based on AI access, and you don\u2019t want someone to be able to switch you off. This is part of why I\u2019m really into local models. But that\u2019s the most doomer take you can squeeze out of me. I\u2019m optimistic.\u201d<\/p>\n
Near the end of our second conversation, on Google Meet, an AI note-taking app that had been quietly sitting in on the call signed off. Genet told me I\u2019d just lost my notetaker. I told her it wasn\u2019t mine; I\u2019d let it in assuming it was hers. \u201cSorry about that,\u201d she said. \u201cMaybe an agent went rogue.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\n If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the June 15, 2026, issue of
\n New York\u00a0Magazine.<\/p>\n