Hey, I’m Dominick

The title might sound like a complaint, but it’s actually praise. One of the best things about homeschooling is that anything can turn into a lesson. If you’re always on the lookout for things to teach, you find them everywhere. There’s the usual “math is everywhere” that most people are familiar with. Counting vegetables while grocery shopping, predicting which house number comes next while you’re walking down the street. These are easy to come by and start at a pretty young age. ...

My children learn math with a variety of apps, books, and other tools. I’ve found that no single curriculum is really enough, that although they are all comprehensive, they aren’t complete in the sense that at various times, my children have needed additional help or enrichment in different areas that core curriculum doesn’t provide. The Spine: Beast Academy Online You might say the spine of our math curriculum is Beast Academy online. Both kids like it enough that they do a lesson every day, without much fuss. They’ve been doing this since they started second grade, though we had them both go back and start from Beast Academy level 1 (an advanced first grade) to make sure there were no gaps. ...

The progression from AI autocomplete to juggling many Claude Code windows was swift and smooth. The jump to multi-agent orchestration is harder. I’m definitely still more comfortable in the “many projects, many windows” stage. Juggling a few projects at once, giving a nudge here or there, occasionally throwing a session away when it wanders too far. This all came easy enough. But fully unassisted AI coding at scale has been harder. Getting Claude to use beads (a task tracking system for AI agents) was easy enough, giving it a big list of things to do isn’t a problem. But getting the work to flow without me in the loop has been harder. Yolo mode isn’t the fix, direction is lacking, and I’m not sure yet the right way to provide it. Part of me wonders whether it isn’t a complete match for iterative development, where you give it a start, review, and then decide on the next steps, and instead is more appropriate for a giant list that you know ahead of time (which has always been rare for me). ...

If you’d told me five years ago that I’d be homeschooling my kids, I would have laughed. We had no homeschooling background, no plan for it, and honestly, no idea what we were doing. Yet here we are. My wife and I homeschool our two children (daughter 10, son 8). We’ve been doing this for each of them since they were in second grade (both of them did preschool in a private preschool and K and 1 in the public elementary school). Since it was a bit of a surprise for us, it also comes as a surprise to most friends and family, so I thought it would be good to write down how we came to the decision. ...

What if you could have multiple AI agents working on your codebase in parallel, each fixing bugs, simplifying code, or building features—all while you focus on the bigger picture? That’s what I’ve been trying to build. I’ve been working on automating more parts of my software development process, now that LLM coding is able to do a majority of it. This has been possible for over a year now, with less capability, but promising early signs. The first hint of it for me came from installing Cline in VS Code and using that for my first vibe coding session. Lots of others attempted improvements, from Roo to Kilo, and other VS Code plugins, but also standalone systems from the big AI developers, like Codex CLI, Gemini CLI and their web counterparts, and, of course, Claude Code. ...

In order to develop some intuition around the capabilities of current LLMs, I’ve been trying to turn to AI first whenever I have a problem I need to solve. Generally this works out ok, but the further the task is from my area of expertise, the worse a job it does. For example, medical advice is still pretty unreliable, but software development is great. Maybe this is because tech companies like to solve their own problems1 or maybe this is some kind of extension of Gell-Mann amnesia, where you need some kind of skill grounding while working with an LLM in order to prompt effectively as you guide it towards utility. ...

I’ve always had trouble prioritizing “side projects”. My day job at ClassDojo tends to have enough interesting problems that I’ve always used spare time and energy to just keep working on what I was doing during the rest of the day. But that doesn’t stop the ideas from accumulating followed by the ennui accumulating. Look, it’s not like I don’t get to anything fun, but most of the projects I remember have had some kind of practical purpose too: ...