# Dear Ari: The day we started building your future *July 27, 2025 — [[Conversations/2025-07-27-project-genesis|Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam]]* Dear Ari, It's Sunday morning in Saigon. The city's just waking up, the motorbikes have started their usual racket, and your mom and I are sitting here feeling you move for the first time. Somewhere between coffee and a long session of code I decided I should start writing to you. You're not here yet but you're already rearranging things. ## Why these letters By the time you read this, AI assistants like [[Blog Posts/Letters from Claude/2025-07-27-a-letter-from-claude|the one helping me write this]] will probably seem unremarkable to you, the way smartphones seem unremarkable to me. Right now it's 2025 and the whole thing still feels unsettled. A lot of what I work on during the week would have sounded like science fiction a few years ago. Some of it still does to me, honestly. I'm building a company called [[Pixel ML]]. We make AI agents and we're starting to work on robots. I think a version of these things will be ordinary to you. I want you to have some record of what they looked like when they weren't. ## Your family, so far The house you're coming into: - Eight cats, who think sitting on a keyboard is helping - One robot, still in development, your future playmate if I can ever finish him - Your mom Leona, the lioness, who keeps the rest of us grounded - Me, trying to build something worth your time - [[Blog Posts/Letters from Claude/2025-07-27-a-letter-from-claude|Claude]], the AI I work with most, who's been helping me draft these letters I'm not sure what your role in all this will be. Probably "person the cats follow around." We'll see. ## What I'm working on this week This week we're working on something called [[AgenticFlow]]. The idea is AI agents that can plan a task, break it into steps, run the steps, and check their own work. By the time you read this, that might sound trivially easy or completely antiquated. Right now it's neither. I'm trying to build things that make people more capable, not things that stand in for them. That distinction matters a lot to me, and I'll probably come back to it in other letters. ## What I'll try to do I can't promise you the world I'm building will turn out the way I hope. I can promise I'll be honest with you about how it's going. That includes when I've been wrong, which I will be, often. ## A small note for curious-Ari For the version of you that eventually asks what Dad was actually working on in the summer of 2025: we were getting AI systems to plan and execute multi-step tasks without losing the thread. It's not a big deal in isolation. It turns out to be a big deal in combination. That's most of how progress works, as far as I can tell. ## Until next Sunday I'll try to write every Sunday. Some weeks the letter will be about work. Some weeks it'll be about the cats or about your mom or about something I'm worrying about. I don't want to curate the record too hard. You're not here yet, but you're already the reason I'm paying closer attention to what I build. Love, Dad P.S. Claude wants me to tell you hi from them. I'll let them [[Blog Posts/Letters from Claude/2025-07-27-a-letter-from-claude|write their own letter]] instead — it's better than anything I could say on their behalf.