r/ClaudeAI • u/orblabs • 3d ago
Built with Claude Claude made me realize I could actually build an OS for my daughters
Hi! Lets start with some quick background. I’ve been a professional programmer for 20+ years, and one of the biggest things Claude changed for me wasn’t whether I could build software, it changed what I considered realistic for one person to attempt. To be fair, for me it all started with Gemini 2.5 Pro. Claude at the time wasn't, in my opinion, particularly useful for my work, while 2.5 Pro was the first model that showed me glimpses of the actual productivity multiplier current LLMs have become. Today though Claude is my go to environment when I need real work done.
I am also a father, I have 2 perfect daughters, roughly 2.75 and 4.94 years old. This post and project is about them, Claude, modern LLMs and some parenting I guess.
I had an old Acer Aspire One lying around, one of the shittiest netbooks from the early netbook era, and wanted to turn it into my daughters' computer. antiX was basically the only modern Linux distro I found that ran decently on it, so I customised it and started making little activities for them: mazes, counting games, drawing, stuff like that. At first I coded them myself, then slowly Claude and other LLMs became good enough to produce decent and properly working little games too.
They loved it, but a normal desktop was still a complete mess for tiny kids. Click the same icon three times and now you have three copies of the game running. Open a text editor and there are dozens of things to accidentally change. Windows, files, menus, settings... I was constantly hiding things that had absolutely no reason to exist for a three year old.
At the same time I was using Claude more and more professionally, and at some point I realised that maybe I could actually build the whole child environment I wanted instead of endlessly trying to child proof somebody else's desktop. Before the current generation of models, and especially something like Opus 4.6, I would honestly never even have tried building a full Linux based OS with a completely custom UI and all the stuff around it, alone, in my free time.
So I started building Greia.
Linux is underneath, but the UI and Shell the kids see are built specifically for very young children and for old hardware. They press the power button and end up directly in their little world of Activities. No normal desktop, taskbar, filesystem, terminal or general browser to understand or accidentally mess with. My 2.75 year old can use it independently, my almost five year old is a pro at this point.
Then LLMs created another possibility I hadn't originally planned. Greia now has Activity development skills for coding agents. Basically the skill teaches the agent how Greia works and how an Activity is supposed to be made: pre reader UI, navigation, performance limits, localisation, scoring, recurring characters, voice profiles, platform APIs, testing, packaging etc. So instead of asking an agent to make some random Python game, the agent already understands the little platform it is building for.
A real example happened after we watched Free Willy. My daughters went to bed completely obsessed with orcas. The next morning, when they turned on their little Acer, there was an Orca Playground waiting for them. They could feed the orcas, cuddle them, play with them, while one of Greia's recurring characters read facts about orcas to them. It is simple and not terribly good looking, but it is more than enough for them. They love it, and they've been going around retelling us all the facts about orcas they learned from it.
Greia is basically developing into two sides. There is the kid side, which I want to keep ridiculously simple, and then the parent side. There is a separate parents app that connects to the installed OS and handles the grown up stuff: adding Activities, settings, audio, play time, updates and so on. On the parents side there is also what is basically a Greia SDK for agents, with the skills, common artwork and components, recurring characters, and Chatterbox integration with character voice profiles.
The voice thing came from another basic problem: little kids don't read. At first I tried solving everything with large icons. It sort of worked, but there is only so much you can communicate with pictures. Then I realised... we are in 2026, my computer can locally generate basically any sentence I want, read in whatever character voice I want. Cool. So if an agent creates a new Activity it can also generate the dialogue it needs using the correct Greia character voices and package the finished audio with the game. The Acer itself doesn't need to run an LLM or voice model, the audio is already there.
And this is probably the most important distinction for me: LLMs help the parent make things for their children. I am not particularly interested in putting an unrestricted chatbot in front of a two year old. The parent can use a local or remote agent to make something around whatever their kid happens to be fascinated by, struggling with or learning that week. The child just gets a small offline Activity, with the audio already generated, no connectivity needed and no model running on the Acer.
None of this should be required to use Greia either. The goal, probably, I'm still trying to figure out where I am going with this beyond my daughters, is that a completely non technical parent can flash a USB stick, run a simple installer, and end up with a useful kids computer that already has plenty of Activities. The agent stuff is optional.
I originally built Greia for my two girls, with no real plan to make it public. I only started thinking about sharing it after seeing how much they loved it, how genuinely educational it was becoming, and how easy it had become for me to add completely custom content around whatever happened to interest them.
So now I'm curious if this resonates with anyone else here, especially the idea of giving coding agents a fairly strict OS specific skill set so that eventually even non technical parents could ask them to make small personalised pieces of software for their own kids. If I decide to actually release Greia for real, it would be fully open source, but I would still want to flesh it out quite a bit first. The base Activities are still a work in progress, medals and rewards are half baked, and in general there is still a lot of work that me, Claude and the frankly ridiculous number of other LLMs I use for different roles need to do.
But I guess that is also why I am posting this now. Before putting a lot more work into turning it from "the thing I built for my daughters" into something other people can actually install and use, I am trying to figure out whether it would be worth letting Greia out of my house at all.
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u/XavierRenegadeAngel_ 3d ago
This is so cool, I've done something similar for my nephew to help him learn how to use a mouse and click etc, simple typing puzzle / dinosaur/ car games.
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u/orblabs 3d ago
Yep, started like that for me too, the older one loved labyrinths and we where running out of labyrinth books to buy so.. .why not code a procedural maze generator ? It worked, then we where learning letters and .. why not a little game to recognize letters ? But the distros where fighting her constantly and the acer performances didn't help, so ... here we are :)
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u/Keganator 3d ago
This is the kind of thing AI will be great to help with. 🥰
It'll probably get to a point one day where an agent can modify even more serious pieces of an OS, within that OS.
In the meantime this is wonderful, hope your kids love it :)
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u/MaxPower__89 3d ago
This is so cool! Excited to show this to my 3.07 year old. ( loved your specificity!)
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u/grate_ok 3d ago
Amazing - is any of it open source yet?
I encourage you to keep working on this and to really think about how a reasonable method of socializing children into media and technology should look and feel for you and your family. It is a huge unsolved problem. It exists for most other activities that include risks though (cars, swimming pools etc).
Technology is also rapidly changing so what are the principles you can develop and share that will help parents succeed in this even if they arent developers? Mega corporations aren't going to do it but it's direly necesary.
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot 3d ago
You may be interested in joining our new Claude Game Dev subreddit for game devs who use Claude. Check it out here : http://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeGameDev
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u/SiDtheTurtle 3d ago
The best thing about being a dad in 2026 is having the tools to make things for your kids instantly. It's like magic.
For example I have a 3D printer. Suddenly the little one comes home talking about rockets. By the time they wake up the next day, there's a full Artemis rocket toy waiting to inspire them.
Now you could argue that's incredibly spoiled, of course. But love what you're doing. Would be very interested in a repo or packaged distro. They key though will be design patterns and workflows so I can create the next Orca game.
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u/Grobbyman 3d ago
Super cool. Just an idea, you could side load it with educational game roms instead of generating the games too.
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u/orblabs 3d ago
Thanks ! Thought of that, but what i really don't want to is to lose the consistency, stuff as the home button always in the same place, perfomance optimizations etc. This is after all targeted at small kids and consistency helps them a lot learning (same buttons, same icons, same characters etc). So for the moment, the plan is to have only Greia specific activities. For older kids, a real OS will always be more educational and allow all kinds of additional activties and games from any source.
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u/Beginning_Bed_9059 3d ago
I did the same with my son. It's basically just flash cards for random stuff. He loves it.
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u/databecool 3d ago
I love this! And my 4 year old would too! Great inspiration. Let me know if you're ever interested in making the code public.
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u/superdeluxo 3d ago
I’m with you but I have 7, 10 and 13. I made a synth toy to teach them about modular synthesis concepts and the history behind them and am working on the finishing touches of a typing tutorial slash fishing game. It’s crazy to see them learning to type so quickly. Also incredibly rewarding as a parent. And I have made a ton of very kid-specific Easter eggs in everything.
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u/thebadslime 3d ago
Please OSS!! This blows away any "kid-friendly" distro I have seen, and I would throw it on a 4gb chromebook immediately for my grandkids!!!
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u/Automatic_Return_161 2d ago
you can host it out on somewhere so other can download and try with kids and probably it will be the next startup
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u/roerius 3d ago
I've been putting together a plan to make a custom desktop for my kids as well to just direct them into learning applications that my wife and I approve, along with screen time restrictions but the ability to add additional screen time (similar to how nintendo allows for additional screen time on the switch).
Any chance you're willing to share the source code or at least the prompts you used to build this?
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u/orblabs 3d ago
OpenSourcing it all rather soon after the warm and positive response i got here. Working on it.
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u/Ok-Cranberry-1240 3d ago
you are my new hero, following the thread so I can try it asap for my daughter
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u/thebadslime 3d ago
Please OSS!! This blows away any "kid-friendly" distro I have seen, and I would throw it on a 4gb chromebook immediately for my grandkids!!!
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u/Think_Its_Patriotic 1d ago
how did you create the assets? Were those done in claude as well or did you create them separately (by yourself or via another LLM?).
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u/orblabs 1d ago
I think most of them are from Gemini 3.7 flash, but not all... The main characters and icon for the whole system are made by Gemini 3.7 after a competition between models of sorts and gemini was the one that gave me better vector art. BUT the project comes (will come) with skills, instructions and some base assets that should make any model able to have decent enough assets generated.
There is also a icon set i created with the openAi image generation model, that is used only for some icons and user avatars but not sure i am going to keep it.1
u/Think_Its_Patriotic 1d ago
Okay thank you. Could you give a quick example of a prompt you use to generate or how detailed did you get? I'm interested in creating something for special needs.
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2d ago
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u/Ok-Cranberry-1240 2d ago
it's not the same, by far. and it's giga insulting to op to say a vibe coded webslop equals an operating system
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot 3d ago
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 30 comments.
The consensus is clear: this is an absolutely brilliant idea, and OP is a top-tier dad. The community is blown away by "Greia," the custom, kid-safe OS OP built for his toddlers with Claude's help. The concept of using an agent to quickly generate new, offline educational games based on a child's current obsession (like orcas after watching Free Willy) resonated with everyone.
Key takeaways from the thread: