I Built a Guardrailed, RAG-Powered AI Workspace for My Autistic Teenager. Here's What Actually Broke.

My daughter is 13 and autistic. She needs homework help at 9pm sometimes. Every AI tool I looked at was either totally unmonitored, pointed at the open internet, or locked behind a school district policy I had zero visibility into. I'm an IT admin. I run a homelab. I have an RTX 3060 sitting there. So I built something myself. This isn't a tutorial. It's a postmortem of everything that failed and what I did to fix it - because the gap between "I have a working Ollama instance" and "this is actually safe for a vulnerable kid" is a lot wider than I expected.