Letter 158. The machine can build it now.

Dear friend,

This week a teenager I know built a working app in an afternoon. He does not have a degree. He has barely finished school. He described what he wanted in plain words, an AI wrote the code, and by evening the thing was running on his phone.

I want you to sit with that for a second, because something quietly enormous just happened to your child's future, and almost nobody is saying it out loud.

For my entire life, the rare and valuable thing was knowing how. How to write code. How to design. How to build the thing. School sold you the how, college sold you the how, and we all agreed to call that a career. You spent years being graded on the how, and the grade was supposed to be the proof.

The how just went free.

This is not a feeling. It is happening on a scale that is hard to believe, this year.

By early 2026, more than half of all the new code in the world is being written or assisted by AI. The analysts say three out of every four new apps this year will be built with almost no traditional coding at all. Building something used to take a team and a year. Now it can take a sentence and an afternoon.

And on the other side of that, the first rung of the ladder is quietly disappearing. Entry-level jobs have fallen by about a third in the last year and a half. The starter tasks a fresh graduate used to cut their teeth on, the first-draft research, the formatting, the summarising, are exactly the things the machine now does best and fastest. The certificate that used to open the door is opening fewer of them.

So here is the question every parent should be asking, and almost none are. If the how is free, and the how was the whole syllabus, then what on earth are we still grading our children on.

Let me answer it the way I have come to believe it.

When the how becomes free, the only things left that are scarce are human. What do you actually want to build. Who is it for. And do you have the nerve to find the people who can help you. The world's own scorekeepers are now saying this in their dry way. As machines make knowledge and analysis cheap and everywhere, the rare and valuable things become trust, judgement, belonging, and knowing what is worth doing at all.

None of that is taught in school. School trains the opposite. It trains a child to find the one right answer to a question somebody else has already set. It is very good at that. And it leaves them, at eighteen, brilliant at answering, and frozen the moment there is no answer key.

I do not want to tell you school is useless. That would be a lie, and you would be right to stop reading. A degree still opens some doors. Knowing how still helps. But a door is not a direction. The world is now full of people who know how, and have no idea what to do with it.

I will not give you theory on this. I will give you three Indians.

Chandrashekhar Mandal grew up in a village in Bihar, did an ordinary M.Com, and took a small finance job in the city. There is no famous college on his sticker. One day he watched daily-wage workers fighting for a single day's work in the rain at a roadside labour chowk, and it broke something open in him. He quit with about forty thousand rupees to his name and built what is now a kind of LinkedIn for blue-collar workers. More than a lakh of them have registered on it.

Jeetendra Lalwani had a plain commerce degree and a job in advertising in Mumbai. When his father fell seriously ill, he found himself chasing ambulances by phone, again and again, and saw with his own eyes how broken our emergency response is. He decided no life should be lost waiting for an ambulance. He built an app that books one in fifteen seconds. It now runs a network of more than twelve thousand ambulances across seven hundred cities.

Mayank Midha studied engineering at a state university in Rohtak, far from any famous institute, and came up working with metal enclosures. He noticed that India's public toilets get vandalised into ruin within weeks. So he built indestructible steel ones. There are now more than seven hundred of them, and he has started exporting them to Africa.

Not one of those three was the best test-taker in the room. Not one of them had the fancy degree. Each one simply refused to un-see a real problem, and then borrowed the how from wherever they could find it. That refusal is the skill. That is the whole new game.

So here is the thing I most want you to take from this letter, and to hand to your child.

The machine can answer almost anything now. It cannot decide what is worth asking. That part is still yours.

If you want it as a tool your seventeen-year-old can actually use, give them these four questions. They are the real syllabus, and not one line of it is in their textbook.

What do I actually want. What problem stands between me and it. Who already knows how to solve that problem. And why would they help me.

A child who can sit with those four questions is more ready for this world than one with a perfect scorecard and no answer of their own.

Now let me give you something to do this week, not just something to nod at.

It is one of the seven hacks from the book I wrote this year for restless kids and the parents trying to raise them. I call it the Three-Day Micro-Experiment.

Day one, brainstorm. Everyone in the house, you included, writes down five things they have secretly wanted to try and never have. Day two, prototype. Each person picks one and spends a single focused hour on it. Watch the tutorial. Attempt the first ugly draft. Record the rough demo. With AI in the room, that one hour now goes further than it ever could before. Day three, showcase. Over dinner, everyone shows what they made. You celebrate the boldest attempt, not the most polished one. Hand a little failure trophy to whoever made the funniest mistake.

It teaches the one thing the scorecard never will. That you do not wait until you are ready to begin. You begin, badly, and you get clear as you go. Most of the choices we agonise over are not tattoos. They are experiments you can run, look at, and run again.

If you know a parent staring at a scorecard this week, wondering what it really predicts, forward them this letter. And if this was forwarded to you, welcome. You can get one of your own every Sunday. Subscribe here: https://qrto.to/66f8cc1e

I made a smoky baingan raita this week.

A fat brinjal, the spiky purple one, held right over the flame until the skin goes fully black and the inside collapses into something soft and smoky. I peeled the char off, mashed the smoke-soaked pulp, and folded it into cool whisked curd with salt, roasted cumin, a little red chilli. Then a quick tadka of mustard oil and garlic poured over the top, and a scatter of coriander. Cold, smoky, a little wild. Nothing like the raita you expect.

Here is what I love about it. Everybody knows baingan. They know it as bharta, the smoky mash, and they stop there. Almost nobody thinks to fold that same smoke into curd. Same humble vegetable, one small experiment, an entirely new thing on the plate. The vegetable was never the limit. The willingness to try it differently was.

That is the whole letter, really. The how is free now. The teenager with the app, the three founders, the odd vegetable, they all point the same way. Stop teaching your child to have the answer. Teach them to find the problem worth solving, and to begin before they feel ready.

This week, do not ask your child what they scored. Ask them what problem annoyed them most. Then help them spend one hour on it. That is the new syllabus.

Write back and tell me what your kid said. I read every reply.

In fratitude (friendship and gratitude),

Adi

P.S. I wrote a whole book about turning a restless, building, cannot-sit-still teenager into a remarkable one, seven hacks and a thirty-day plan, the Three-Day Micro-Experiment above is just one of them. It is called Restless to Remarkable. You can find it here.

[unsubscribe]