During the pandemic, my son decided to tackle tic-tac-toe in Python. He built it in a couple of days, and I was a proud dad. Then I realized: I had done the same thing 30 years ago at his age! Programming hadn’t become any easier—we’d just taught more people how to do it.

I challenged my son next: write a program to check if a number is prime. My advice to “think like a machine” fell flat. Then I had an epiphany. I asked him to write pseudo code, explaining the steps in plain language. That was a breeze—it took five minutes. But turning it into working code was tough, and after a few hours, my son gave up.

Why was programming still so hard after seven decades of innovation and thousands of languages? I promised to find an easier language for him. He pointed to his pseudo code and asked, “Why can’t this work?” I laughed and said, “Those are just your notes. The machine can’t understand that.” He replied, “Why can’t it be like Alexa?”

And that was the light bulb moment. After a long pause, I told my son to skip Python. And thus, Kognitos was born.