Practical AI for actual family life.

Some of it is useful. Most of the marketing is hype. Bounded, specific tasks — planning a park day, turning a school email chain into a calendar, designing a replacement part for a broken toy — work today. Open-ended promises ('AI will run your life!') don't. I test each use on my own family and publish what worked, what failed, and what it cost.

No. Everything here is written in plain English, with jargon translated on the spot. If a tool needs real technical setup, I say so up front so you can skip it — and the technical readers get the exact settings and configs when they want them.

Treat it as the first question, not an afterthought — I do. The short version: don't put kids' names, faces, schools, or schedules into AI tools, and assume anything you type may be used for training unless the tool clearly says otherwise. Every write-up here covers the privacy tradeoffs of the specific tool being tested.

It can be, and people who refuse it on creative or ethical grounds have a fair position — some of my friends hold it. My approach: use AI for logistics and drudgery, never for the parts that are supposed to be yours. When a tool crosses that line, I say so and skip it.

Pick one bounded task you already do — planning a trip, meal planning from what's in the fridge — and test an AI tool on just that, this week. The newsletter walks through one tested use case at a time, so subscribing is the low-effort version of the same idea.