AI Parenting
Correcting and guiding an AI is deeply similar to dealing with an overly curious, know-it-all, but ultimately clueless five-year-old.
I’ve been working with frontier and local LLMs daily for the past year for knowledge work, in products, and for programming. Extensively. Every time a new “best-in-class” model was released, I immediately switched to it, adapting my prompts, learning its quirks, and dealing with varying levels of frustration, bewilderment, and occasional amusement.
I think today’s cutting-edge frontier models, like Claude Opus 4.5 or Gemini 3 Pro, are like a smart college student with nanosecond access to Wikipedia and Stack Overflow wired directly into their brain raised up on a derelict spaceship with a snapshot of the Internet from 2025. They know what a quantum superposition is, can recite the entire history of the Roman Empire backwards, but have never used a swing. When asked to draw one, they do it like an overenthusiastic five-year-old, adding all the cool features a swing “need” like rocket engines, homing-lasers and wheels. And when you point out that it’s not a swing anymore, they become sycophantic, replying that they’ll do better next time, and suggest building a merry-go-round instead. Because, why not? It’s better than a swing!
And because they have both, ADHD and the memory of an elderly person: they can describe in detail what they did at 12:01 a.m. on Monday, March 1, 1920, but can only tell you what they had for breakfast ten minutes ago by checking the leftovers on their plate. But you’ll have to ask a few times as they’ll get distracted mid-sentence. The hard part is that LLMs don’t understand how the world works, or social norms and conventions. They learned social interactions reading 4chan, Reddit and watching TikTok.
All of this made me realize that the most helpful skill for herding AI agents is not necessarily extensive domain knowledge (you still need that!), but rather the experience you gain as a parent. Correcting and guiding an AI is deeply similar to dealing with an overly curious, know-it-all, but ultimately clueless five-year-old. You need to be patient, consistent, and willing to repeat yourself. You need to set boundaries and enforce them. And you need to be prepared for the occasional tantrum. But the outcomes will amaze you.