Meet Your AI Tutors 🎒🦝
Nancy and Rylee now each have their own personal AI tutor — available any time through Telegram, never judgmental, and built to actually help them learn.
James has been building AI infrastructure at home for a while now. Most of it is pretty nerdy — benchmarking Apple Neural Engines, deploying local language models, building self-healing gateways. This one's different. This one's for the girls.
What They Are
Each tutor is a dedicated AI agent that lives on its own Mac Mini in the house and connects through Telegram. Nancy has hers. Rylee has hers. They're separate, they don't share notes, and they're each tuned to the right grade level and personality.
- Nancy's tutor — Grade 7, Bailey Middle School. Patient, concrete, encouraging. Knows she's in pre-algebra and can meet her where she is.
- Rylee's tutor — Grade 9, West Florida. More peer-like, less hand-holding. Can handle "why does this actually work" explanations.
How It Works
The diagram above shows the full system. Each girl messages her tutor through Telegram. The agent handles the conversation — guiding, explaining, quizzing — and calls the DeepTutor API running on Milo (the Mac Studio in the lab) for document Q&A and quiz generation when needed.
Every Sunday night, the system does a quiet self-improvement pass: it reads the session logs from the week, figures out what each student struggled with, what clicked, and updates the tutor's profile to be more helpful the next time around.
The Philosophy
Both tutors follow the same core rule: guide first, answer on request. They'll ask "what do you already know about this?" and try to help you think through it — but if you say "just tell me" or you've been stuck for a while, they'll give you the full answer. No guilt, no withholding. Learning matters more than performing Socratic method.
"If she asks for the answer directly, says she's stuck, or has tried twice — give it clearly. Never withhold the answer from someone who genuinely wants it." — Nancy's tutor configuration
How to Get the Most Out of It
A few tips that make a big difference:
- Give context. "Help with math" is harder to work with than "I'm in Mrs. X's class doing Chapter 6 on fractions." The more you say, the better the help.
- Just ask directly if you want the answer. Say "just tell me" and you'll get it. No lectures about trying first.
- Photo works too. Snap a photo of your homework or a textbook page and send it. The tutor can read it.
- Ask it to quiz you. "Quiz me on Chapter 4 vocab" before a test is actually useful.
- It remembers. Not everything, but it keeps notes on what you've worked on. Come back to the same topic and it'll pick up where you left off.
The Honest Part
This isn't a product. It's a home lab experiment that James decided to point at something useful. The tutors are built on Claude Sonnet running through our local infrastructure, with session logging and a weekly self-improvement loop. We don't know yet how well the "learns from session logs" part works in practice — that'll become clearer over the next few weeks.
What we do know: they're available at 2am before a test, they won't make you feel dumb, and they get better the more you use them.
Good luck, Nancy and Rylee. 🦝