Stories should feel like magic.

The seed was planted in 2022, in Costa Rica, in the blurred weeks after my son was born. A new AI tool had just come out — you type a sentence, it paints you a picture. I was teaching myself how to build software on the side, and I kept playing with it. Amazing technology, obviously. But I wasn't looking for a product. I was just having fun.

Two years later, we were back in the States. I had a tech job at Fender — the guitar company — and my son was turning two. He was starting to read. Actually read. Way earlier than he should have been able to.

So I started doing something a little ridiculous. I'd ask an AI chatbot to write him a short, specific story — one about something he was curious about that day, or something funny he had just done. I'd paste the result into a Google doc and we'd read it together on the couch.

Then I wanted pictures. So for every page, I'd ask the AI to generate an image for that paragraph and I'd paste it in above the words. I did this one page at a time, by hand, until I had something that looked like a Frankenstein of a picture book — the art never quite matched from page to page. Didn't matter. He loved them.

Around that same time, I'd gotten curious about building apps for the iPhone. So I made a decision: I was going to turn the whole thing into a real app. It was a slog. Weeks of writing code I didn't fully understand, breaking things, searching for answers at 1 a.m., getting demoralized, and figuring it out anyway. Until one day — it worked. A fully illustrated story, generated from a single idea, right there on a phone.

And the whole time, I was actually using it. If he scraped his knee on the playground, I'd make a story about a little boy who scraped his knee. If he was scared of something, we'd face it in a story first. If we just needed to be silly, we'd be silly. Daily life turned into instant stories. Reading stopped being something we did together — it became something he owned.

He's four now. He reads at a wildly advanced level, fully on his own. He's read well over a thousand books from our local public library — which means our family has saved more than $16,000, just because we had access to something most of the world doesn't.

I think about that a lot. The kids who don't have that library. The kids who don't have anyone with time to sit beside them and read. And the fact that the average American adult reads less than one book a year.