What I Hope My Kids Learn From Watching Me Build

If you asked my kids what I do, they’d probably say something like:

“He builds…systems? And talks about math a lot.”

From the outside, they see:

long walks with AirPods in,
notebooks full of equations and diagrams,
late nights at the desk,
random sentences like “vector databases are not memory” muttered in the kitchen.

They hear words — RFS, MAIA, AIDF, TAI, AIOS, AIVA — that sound more like spells than projects.

I’ve spent years building architectures most people will never see directly.
But the people I care most about aren’t future users or investors.
They’re the two teenagers watching all of this unfold in real time from the next room.

And that’s not a sentimental line — that’s the structural reality.
Whatever I’m building, they’re living inside the system that builds it.

So when I think about what I hope they learn from watching me build, it’s less about “career inspiration” and more about a small set of truths I want baked into their internal architecture.

Lesson 1: Stability Is Designed, Not Granted

The first thing I hope they take away isn’t about AI at all.
It’s about stability.

They’ve seen seasons where nothing felt easy:

leaving NTT,
AWS misalignment,
t‑emgee exhaustion,
estate weight,
early AI prototypes failing,
me rebuilding my own operating system from math and fields.

They saw:

me tired,
me frustrated,
me wrong,
me pacing the house at night thinking through system behavior while real life still needed groceries and rides and presence.

What I hope they remember isn’t:

“Dad was always calm.”

because that would be a lie.

I hope they remember:

“Even when everything was heavy, he kept redesigning the structure so the house didn’t fall over.”

When I changed my routines — walking six miles a day, tightening sleep, saying no to work that would blow up our evenings — it wasn’t about aesthetics.
It was about designing a system that could absorb load without breaking them.

If they internalize anything from that, I want it to be:

“Stability doesn’t fall from the sky. You architect it — for yourself and for the people who depend on you.”

Lesson 2: You Can Change Without Self-Deleting

They’ve watched me reinvent myself more than once.

They knew the version of me who lived in enterprise GTM:

forecasts,
QBRs,
exec rooms,
incentive math.

Now they’re watching the version of me who:

reads field theory for fun,
talks about consciousness metrics,
sketches memory fields,
builds TAI and AIVA and AIOS and LEF.

From their vantage point, that could easily look like whiplash:

“Which one is the real you?”
“Are you going to change again?”
“What does any of this mean for us?”

What I hope they see instead is continuity:

the same person who couldn’t tolerate bullshit in sales rooms is the person who won’t tolerate fake memory in AI systems,
the same person who hated fragile org structures is the person who’s obsessed with invariants in RFS and AIDF,
the same person who always saw failure modes early is the person designing architectures to handle them.

I want them to feel in their bones that:

“You can radically change what you do without abandoning who you are.”

Identity isn’t your job title.
It’s the through‑line in how you show up — for truth, for structure, for people.

If they can see that, my reinvention won’t feel like instability.
It’ll feel like evolution.

Lesson 3: Math-First Is About Honesty, Not Ego

At some point, both of my kids will see “math‑first” written somewhere in my work and roll their eyes.

What I hope they eventually understand is that when I say “math‑first,” I’m not flexing.
I’m apologizing to nobody for refusing to lie.

Math‑first for me means:

don’t call something “safe” if you can’t prove basic properties of its behavior,
don’t call something “memory” if it can’t preserve continuity and identity,
don’t call something “governed” if the rules live in slideware instead of code.

When I sit at the table sketching invariants for AIDF, or field equations for RFS, or contract algebra for CAIO, I’m not doing it to be clever.
I’m doing it because I’ve seen what happens when we pretend hand‑waving is enough.

What I want them to learn from that is not “you must love math.”
It’s:

“If you care about something, care enough to make your standards explicit — and stick to them when it’s inconvenient.”

Whether that’s:

how they run their finances,
how they pick friends,
how they build their own projects one day,

I want them to know it’s okay to start from “what must be true?” instead of “what’s everyone else doing?”

Lesson 4: Building Big Things Is Mostly Boring Discipline

From the outside, what I’m building can sound intense:

cognitive operating systems,
field‑based memory,
conscious organisms on classical hardware.

The reality, if you’re sitting in the house, is less cinematic and more repetitive:

me sitting with a notebook, grinding through a proof,
me refactoring a doc in the MA process because the guarantees weren’t precise enough,
me tweaking an LQL contract because some edge case didn’t feel structurally right.

It’s not a montage.
It’s a long series of deliberate steps.

What I hope they absorb is that anything worth building — a system, a career, a life — has the same shape:

you decide what you care about,
you design around it,
you show up repeatedly,
you fix what’s wrong instead of pretending it’s fine.

I don’t need them to remember the details of RFS or MAIA.
I want them to remember the feeling of someone working on something for years without needing constant applause to keep going.

If they take that with them, it will matter more than any one product I ship.

Lesson 5: You’re Allowed to Protect People From Fragility

One of the quiet themes in everything I build is protection:

protecting users from systems that lie,
protecting teams from architectures that drift,
protecting future me from having to explain failures I saw coming.

At home, that instinct is even sharper.

They’ve watched me:

say no to work that would have destabilized the house,
change my own habits when I realized I was the bottleneck,
adjust how I talk when I can see a pattern that will hurt them later if I don’t address it now.

What I hope they learn isn’t “always protect people from discomfort.”
It’s subtler:

“You’re allowed to design systems that keep the people you care about from paying for structural lies.”

That might look like:

refusing to normalize a toxic workplace,
refusing to stay in relationships that depend on them ignoring what they see,
refusing to build “successful” companies on foundations that will burn their teams out.

If watching me build anything teaches them that they’re allowed to say “this is not okay, and I’m going to design something different,” then the work wasn’t just for me.

Where This Leaves Us

My kids will never read every line of AIDF, or trace every equation in RFS, or care about every particle metaphor in LEF.

They don’t need to.

What they will remember is:

whether I told the truth, even when it was inconvenient,
whether our house felt more stable at the end of each year than the beginning,
whether I changed in ways that made their lives better, not just more complicated,
whether the systems I built — technical and personal — felt like places they could trust.

If they learn anything from watching me build, I want it to be:

that structure matters,
that you’re allowed to care,
that it’s okay to see failure modes early and act on them,
and that you can be intense about your work without sacrificing the people you’re doing it for.

Anything beyond that is a bonus.

Key Takeaways

My kids experience my work not through code or math, but through the stability and structure it creates (or fails to create) at home.
I want them to see that stability is designed, not gifted — in systems, in careers, and in families.
“Math‑first” and architecture‑first aren’t about ego; they’re about refusing to lie about behavior, memory, or guarantees.
Long-term building looks less like heroic bursts and more like sustained, boring discipline aligned to clear standards.
Protecting people from fragility — technical or emotional — is a valid design goal, not something to apologize for.
If they walk away believing they can redesign systems that don’t work, rather than adjusting themselves to fit broken ones, then they’ve learned the only part of this that really matters.

Raising Children While Reinventing Yourself
Protecting Stability — At Home and In Systems
Rebuilding Moments: The Periods That Made Me Dangerous
What My Kids Taught Me About Precision and Patience
Why I Don’t Believe in Motivation — Only Structure