YouSaid · the spoken record

Quinn McDonald

lines on the record: 71
first: 2026-04-13
most recent: 2026-04-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Bringing my attention to this, like I needed their information to say, you know, you could have done this yourself on cloud code or codecs. I'm like, yeah, I know. I'm aware of that. But so I'm building agents to do things for me, and they're effectively, they're using the computer. They're using my computer for me because I cannot sit there and use it”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then I Think I do think that a weird superpower of mine is just how incredibly motivated I am for agents to do work for me. And I do think all of us here could relate to this like in our early motherhood phase, we are some of the most motivated individuals to be able to get work done on a computer without having to sit down and touch the computer because that is the barrier. Like I'm literally holding a baby, like my keyboard is being pressed by baby's feet or something. It's like a grown man cannot compute the difficulties that I'm having using my laptop, right? So, and sometimes people will react even to my online content and say like you could just use cloud code for this. And I'm like, yeah, I could if I had time to say on my computer because what I am building, like when an agent, when I say that I had an agent build a website and like I or build, you know, an app, they are using cloud code or equivalent codecs, all these products. And so people are sometimes”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know what I'm saying? So that's why photos actually are easier for them. Like if I take a couple photos and then a voice note, it's serving a very similar purpose to a video, but it's much easier and therefore cheaper for them to transcribe it or like to make a log. Yeah. So video is not possible. And maybe, you know, I'm going to start playing with local models soon. Maybe when I'm a little bit less sensitive to a like chewing tokens or just like because it just seems a little silly to be like, I paid $8 for the agent to like watch this video. Right. It just kind of feels like that wasn't the point, you know, but all this stuff may come down in price and maybe at some point that is also like viable. Yeah.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so the quickest way to a great log is to somehow get it turned into language, like to text. So when I do a voice note, obviously that's being transcribed. The Asian is reading, effectively reading my text. Video is the hardest one. It burns a lot of tokens to actually make an agent, like watch a video. But you could have an agent transcribe the video, but what you have to ask yourself is, was there enough language? Was there enough spoken words in this lesson for them to understand what happened? Because they're actually not usually truly watching it like we would watch it.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the screen captures and it's hearing us, so it's hearing me say to Quinn, like, hey, you know, maybe you missed this, like, it's hearing what Quinn says, it's hearing what I say and a screen capturing, then I don't make any voice note about the lesson. I just send a loom recording. I say, I just send it to the agent with like a text being like, this is Quinn's math today. And it parses everything.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have tried. I've tried a couple different things. So this is a total experimentation. I don't think I can say it in any front. Like we're like weeks into this, months into this. I've landed on the final expression. But what I have done that like you just said is I use Loom the product of the”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like someone sat down with a cup of tea and they're like, Quinn's Gs are coming together, you know, like, and you're like, It's like so lovingly written, and it has no relationship. If you listen to the voice now, it's like, I'm like, she's struggling with her, do you? She should really figure that out. And then, and then it like parses that and it writes it like this loving parent. Like it just writes like this beautiful book. Would you?”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The logging is also voice notes. Everything is voice notes. Voice of what's in photos because I don't have time to sit at the laptop very often. So I need it to be like really mobile friendly. So the logging, so imagine you've got this agent. They know all of my core curriculums, everything, but the missing link is where is that child at? So when I'm in the session with Quinn and she's doing some math and she's doing some reading, et cetera, I just snap a couple quick photos usually. Maybe the photo of the page of the book we're on or like I snap a couple like establishing pics usually but without taking a bunch of time to like sit there and document I'm mainly interacting with Quinn the five-year-old and then right when she finishes I make a quick voicemail and I'm like Quinn today we did less than 37 in the phonics and she's still struggling with the G sound blah blah blah it but really like a sub 30 second voice note like like really fast right and I send that off to the agent and the agent takes the couple photos I sent and the 30 second voice note and writes this like beautiful”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So then the missing loop is the logging. Okay, so how would it know where she is in her curriculum if I don't log? The logging actually is like such a geeky concept. I don't know what it smells like, it seems like a small detail, but getting the logging really good made this whole thing really sink.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Specifically, my philosophy, and then feeding at the book. So I would say it's a combo of my feeding it, my philosophy like verbally and explaining myself, and then feeding it cortex, including core curriculums like this science curriculum. So then what I do to answer your question, I'll be going in with the five-year-old and I'll just say, what's our next? I'll make a quick voice. That's why I always do this, is like me making a voice, so this is me making pretend voice note. I'll say like, I'm going in with five-year-old. What comes next on science and math for them? And in just a few minutes, the agent can spit out where we are in our phonics curriculum, where we are in our math. And then I've also taken photos of all of the educational materials I own, like Montessori bees and these types of things. So my agent will send me a completed lesson plan, including photos of things I own in my own cabinet to pull out. And it'll be like, oh, Quinn.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Foundational document where I talk about what I think about Montessori and like I just basically imagine me this is how imagine me like walking around making like voice notes like waxing poetic about all my like educational philosophies and stuff and then my agent like literally sycophantically being like this is brilliant you know this is so good But I can look past that. I can look past the LLMs giving me praise. But you”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Choosing So, one thing that gave me a leg up in my setup when I started setting up some of my agents, and we'll get into that, is that I did know what curriculums I wanted to follow. I have been reading for many years just different curriculum books and following different homeschoolers and kind of finding little tips. And so there's this, you know, this science curriculum that I really love called Building the Foundations of Scientific Understanding. And so it helps to know what you're trying to do because what I did when I first spun up my first homeschool agent is I actually fed them the text of these books. So I actually either took photos of the pages or I was able to find PDFs online of like the full text of the book. So I didn't say like, what should we do next in this book and ask it to like go search the web? My agent that focuses on homeschool has the text of all the core curriculums I'm trying to do. And I created like a core pedagogy kind of like.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, that's amazing. My five year old after. It's really hard. And that's why I talked about building up. It's like a tolerance. Like, I would say we started at like five minutes. And the trick is that I try to not say like, don't talk to me. I never actually vocalize that. I just remove myself and go away. There's a couple places that are great where we live where I can go away. And then my mom also lives with us in like a little kind of mother-in-law suite, like a separate little building. And so the kids will like wander farther and farther from me. And sometimes I'll like, it's almost like we got a walkie-talkie system. I'm like, they're near you now. And then so like, but they will actually wander away. Like, like totally away. Even the three-year-old, but they'll stay together. So, so they'll stay together. Anyway, we can get into my neglect strategies if you'd like, but it doesn't really relate to AI, except for the fact that when I'm doing the benevolent neglect, I get to do more.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then after that Maybe then it's like mid morning, we will just do some more unstructured activities like playing and playing outdoors or trying to pull on a thread of something we're doing where we leave the house maybe going kind of a field trip or something like this. One time a week we do a homeschool pod with two other families. Between the three families, there's 11 kids already when you meet homeschoolers. These people are reproducing, all right? So three families, 11 kids already. And so once a week I lead a science pod. So on that day,”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, an average day, a typical day, wake up at the crack of dawn, right? Because there's a small person who has decided that that's when we get up. And they're like, you get up. So anyway, I'm like waking up and there's like small little gremlin creatures around my bed. So that's where we start. We go from there. Obviously, all the basics, like having breakfast, yada, yada. There's three kids I'm really homeschooling now because one is a baby. One is about four months old. I start early, but not bad early. The three are five, four, and two, the three other children. And I try to do individual sessions with them. So imagine after breakfast and these types of things. I have a place where we homeschool and I cycle the kids in one at a time. And I need help with the kids even to do that, right? So I am lucky enough to have some help with the kids during certain portions of the day. So I cycle the kids in one at a time to where we homeschool and I do a one-on-one session with them. You know, depends on the kids' mood. They're all quite young, but it can be anywhere from like 20 minutes to an hour.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is such a huge deal for me. I was resigned and not in the super depressing way, but just being really blunt, to not challenging myself to build technical or hard things for the next five years or so. I was like, I really want to be present with my kids. We're doing homeschooling, which is like a wild choice. And so I was kind of, yeah, I think the right word is resigned to it. Not sad, not resentful, but just like, okay, I need to take this break, basically. That is no longer true. What happened a few months ago is that is no longer true. I feel like I've been building better things than I ever have before while I spend almost all of my waking hours, like with my children. I can explain how I do the flow of the day where I do that, where there's things I do during the day and things I do at night when they're asleep and stuff. But I'm like truly building things I'm impressed with personally and I'm being an active mom. And that was not possible a few months ago. Like it's actually a sea change for me personally. It's like.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“15 minutes there. And I started feeling like maybe I can build stuff. The tools are getting so good. But then about two, three months ago, I saw people saying, I'm using obsidian as a second brain for this thing. And it was called Claude. And then all these different names. And they were referencing this. And I was like, what are they talking about? This was December and into January. And that's when I realized, wait, I can build agents who actually code for me while I'm hanging out with my kids. That was a complete game changer. Actually, just pausing that for one moment.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And maybe talk about that six month, like, what was the thing that happened six months ago? Or do you remember what the moment was where you're like, I need to start building to fix this problem? Or what was the story behind that? Well, my co-founder from Lumi, which was a packaging company, so literal physical packaging, we managed a packaging marketplace. He is now off running something called Obsidian. And it's a markdown note-taking app. And I say this because I follow him on Twitter. Obviously, we're co-founders. And then I follow all these Obsidian geeks on Twitter. And I started noticing a change in the conversation, change in the conversation them talking about how they were like building really wild things with cloud code. That stuff was referenced. The discussion about interesting ways they started using obsidian. And what really caught my eye, the six months ago, was me feeling like, hey, I actually feel like I couldn't probably be building things myself now in the small bits of time that I have. So I have confetti time. Like I have 10 minutes here.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Obsession. It can only be described as an obsession because I've just been building almost non stuff. But when I say that on a database basis, I'm actually spending a lot of time with my kids. And so I was trying to find like how can I build things that are relevant to my life. So I know we're going to dig into that, but that's a little bit of how I got to now.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ago. And so I do on the one hand, I'd say I have a technical background. On the other hand, I would admit openly that my co-founder was the technical co-founder. So I want to be like, I want people to understand, yes, I've been swimming in these waters. I've sat in many an engineering meeting where I was sort of following along and sort of lost. I've sat in many product cycles and reviews. So it gives me a vocabulary, but I hadn't opened terminal to try to build something myself until maybe six months ago. So I think we're living through a really fascinating time where only recently after running a company myself did I feel like now the tools are so good that I can really use natural language to build things. And so the last six months have been like a Cambrian explosion for me of building. And of course the last few months where we have the open claw, then I went completely obsessed. So I'm happy to discuss that. But I went down a completely”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was resigned to not challenging myself to build technical or hard things for like the next five years or so. I really want to be present with my kids. I need to take this break, basically. That is no longer true. A weird superpower of mine is just how incredibly motivated I am for agents to do work for me. I got my agents to learn how to build other agents on their own so I could be like we need another agent you guys and they actually can spin them up without me touching the machine, which is a little crazy. But the first few weeks were very rough. It would be a level of pain that I wouldn't want an average person to go through. But the thing is,”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source