Learning by Echo: Parenting, AI, and the Return to Wonder and Curiosity

As parents, we watch our children learn in the most astonishing ways. They build with no instruction. They explore without plans. They ask questions we never thought to ask. They don’t begin with rules—they begin with curiosity and wonder. And that is where this story begins.

Because something big is shifting with AI. We can see changes not just in how children will explore and learn about the world through screens, but also in the skills and expertises adults will need to thrive in the world that’s coming. Artificial intelligence isn’t just a tool for experts. It’s becoming a partner in exploration, leveling performance between people with different skill levels. 

And in this moment, a rare invitation is opening up: a possibility to reimagine what it means to learn, not just for our kids, but for adults as well.

The Adult Skill Acquisition Model 

Some models don’t just shape our understanding—they guide us. The Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition is one of those rare guides. Initially developed from observing Navy pilots, and later confirmed in fields like medicine and engineering, it describes how humans become experts: not in a sudden leap, but through stages, from rule-bound novices to intuitive masters. It’s a model built on phenomenology, the insight that expertise is embodied, not just stored in the mind.

It remains a powerful frame to think about learning. But today, something new is emerging, something that doesn’t replace the Dreyfus model but that builds a different path of learning, a path closer to how young children learn. This new path, opens a trajectory that looks less like climbing a staircase and more like being pushed into an adventure of learning in action at different skill levels, without fully understanding what you are doing.

A Shift in Skills, Expertise and Learning

Imagine you want to build something. Maybe it requires an app, connecting services and managing user information. Just a year ago, that meant learning a programming language, practicing its syntax, and understanding its logic. Today, you can throw a loose prompt—"build a signup form" or "explain this error message"—into ChatGPT. And something happens. The machine answers. You move forward. You adjust. You build. Even if you don’t know what you’re doing in a formal sense, you’re doing something.

Developers call this "vibe coding."

You move with momentum rather than by mastery, guided by an intuition of what you are after. It is like working alongside an expert on call that lets you skip steps—not by cheating, but by collaborating. You try something. The system replies. You shape it. It adjusts. You continue.

Andrew Ng even calls a version of vibe coding "lazy prompting." But that phrase fails to see what’s really happening. It’s not laziness—it’s trust. It’s intuition. It’s learning to begin with fragments, with a sense of direction, and building from there, knowing the system can meet you halfway.

And this is the shift.

First, skill can emerge from application, skipping certain foundational steps.

This isn’t about skipping the hard work. It’s about gaining experience and tapping into our intuition in a different way. Rather than starting with rules, we can start with AI-assisted tinkering, supercharging our intuition. Sometimes that’s enough. Sometimes it’s more than enough. Because the tools now carry the knowledge for us—they know the rules, recall the patterns. You can act without having first followed the rules. That’s a big change. Experts have to learn to let go of the rules and trust their intuition anyway. Now, we can do so sooner, with the help of AI.

Second, we are finally breaking with the interpretation that thinking happens in the brain.

This part is more philosophical, but important. We’ve long treated the mind as the center of learning. But AI shows us something else: thinking can be distributed. It can live in the interaction between you and a system. In the iterative back-and-forth. In the prompt and the edit. It’s a shared cognitive process, and it changes what it means to learn and "know."

Third, we are returning to the learning style of children.

Before school, before structure, there’s curiosity. Children don’t begin with rulebooks. They begin with action. They learn by doing, failing, adjusting. This is the Montessori model. And now, for the first time in a long time, adults are stepping into that same kind of learning space.

Which brings us to parenting—not just as guidance, but as participation.

At the heart of Curiosity Craft is a different relationship with technology. Not a program, not a pedagogy, but a shared experiment. A quiet rebellion against the idea that learning must always be linear, rules-based, or hierarchical. In Curiosity Craft, the parent becomes an explorer. The child, a guide. The home, a space of inquiry. Mistakes are maps. Questions are doors. And the unknown is not a threat, but an ally where AI can be the spark of many adventures.

More than witnessing a new way of learning, we are being invited to compose it together.

To learn without knowing. To gain guided experience without following fixed, rigid rules. To teach without certainty. To begin, again and again, as if each attempt were a small act of creation. This is the promise of the moment made possible through our partnership with AI.

We will still need the Dreyfus Model. Some traditions must still be climbed step by step. Most likely, learning new musical instruments, for example, will still require learning rudiments and rules that you gradually come to embody. But in other domains, such as coding, the learning will be more fluid, closer to our first experiences discovering how to ride our bike without training wheels. Finding our way by feel. By rhythm, trust, and momentum. We don’t know yet which domains will be open to this new way of developing intuition. It is up to all of us to experiment in this new AI-assisted style of learning.

And if we let go of the need to always know the way, we might just find that the path appears beneath our feet, exactly as we step forward.

That’s not a lowering of standards, it's a transformation in how we engage with the world and learn. It’s the beginning of another story and, perhaps, the beginning of a new way of parenting too.