I Tried to Automate My Son’s College Applications. Here’s Why I Stopped.
Parenting through social media was hard, but what’s coming next might be harder.
AI agents don’t just shape how kids feel- they risk outsourcing how kids function and learn.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot while vibe coding a new idea to help high school students navigate college performing arts applications. I just watched my son go through it. It’s a gauntlet:
Tracking down non-responsive professors. Digging up obscure email addresses. Figuring out who’s on sabbatical, who left, who moved. My wife even tracked a professor down at a jazz club – yep, we attended the show to meet him live 😉
Untangling campus visits – realizing general tours are completely separate from music department sessions and studio time. At times, it felt like we were full-time travel agents.
Moreover, besides the “standard” college applications, there was learning dozens of songs – some overlapping and some not, in different keys, and with different background tracks. There were videos, live auditions, and Zoom ones too. It all required a mix of printed pages, colored folders, multi-tab Google sheets, and tons of email.
As I think about a product for other parents navigating this process, I’m realizing an AI agent could do a lot of this organization in minutes. I’ve been so excited about the idea and then I stopped and realized … Should I build this?
If we automate all of it, we remove the training.
By building that spreadsheet and chasing down those professors, my son didn’t just complete applications. He learned project management. He learned resilience. He learned self-advocacy.
He learned how to navigate the friction of the real world.
In venture and product, we’re obsessed with removing friction. But when it comes to developing young adults, friction is the feature.
The challenge for builders (and parents) over the next decade isn’t just figuring out how AI can do things for our kids. It’s figuring out how to design AI that helps them do hard things, all without removing the struggle required to actually grow.
