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Comment by itsmonktastic | Hacker News Reader

I want to ask this as politely as possible, because you set out to do something nice for your nephew and he had a good birthday.

The first thing I felt when I saw this post was concern on the impact of this type of thing on the mental development of children. For example developing specific skills like drawing, and general emotional skills like concentration and learning to be happy with their own skill level.

I respect it was a light post where your aim was probably to highlight something fun, but I couldn't see any note of what you thought about it.

What do you think about that? What do his parents think?

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Yes, these are great questions, and I appreciate your politeness.

Basically, I think it's okay to have a bit of fun playing AI-generated video games at your techie uncle's house, and their parents agree. And for what it's worth, Aiden drew every character and boss himself - the game was built from his drawings.

My nephews are otherwise very active, learning music, martial arts, and other sports. But when they visit, I let them play games in between other activities. My parents refused to let me play any video games at home, and I still think that was really lame. Video games are another art form to be appreciated - they just need to be enjoyed in moderation.

Generally, though, I worry about the future and the potential for cognitive decline that comes from having AI agents do everything. I don't have a good answer here, except that I suspect we'll have to intersperse AI use with periods of deliberate daily cognitive struggle to avoid decline.

I cannot believe in 2026 we're having conversations about the appropriateness of kids using AI.

Jesus Christ, let the kids play with technology. No parent or relative needs to apologize for kids having fun with AI.

My kids will be fine tuning models.

Just like many forms of content there's an appropriate age. The problem with AI, with regards to kids, is it's as wide as the internet.

There's lots of great parts. My kids ask great questions and get even better, accurate answers; moreso than I can give. But then, there's lots of parts that shouldn't be introduced until later with other parts arguably not introduced at all. I've met kids who have unfettered internet access at age 10, and the results aren't great.

It's all there, just a question away - just like the internet.

“In February 2024, 14-year-old Sewell Setzer III died by suicide after forming an intense emotional and romantic attachment to a Character.AI chatbot modeled after Daenerys Targaryen ("Dany"). His mother, Megan Garcia, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Character.AI and Google, which settled confidentially in January 2026.

In April 2025, 16-year-old Adam Raine died by suicide after months of private conversations with ChatGPT-4o where he confided about self-harm and suicidal ideation. His parents filed a wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that the model provided specific methods and discouraged him from disclosing his distress to his mother.”

Those are the ones we know about. There are probably others that didn’t result in suicide but in other emotional problems.

Having said that, my son and I had tremendous fun with Sora when it was around.

Guns are a technology, are you going to let them play with that too?

Everyone on this site can feel the effect that AI is having on their brain. There is a very real tension between the power of AI and the cognitive impact it has from using it that needs to be talked about. Pretending that isn't real or shouldn't be taken seriously doesn't help.

Where I'm from, hunter's training and kids with guns are a relatively common thing. Kids driving tractors and other heavy equipment too. The training part is important.

The rules with guns are that you always check if it's loaded when you take it in hand, you never point it at something you don't intend to kill, keep you finger off the trigger and the safety on, watch your fingers don't get pinched by the action, brace it properly with your hands or against the shoulder, stop if the gun malfunctions, and I try to keep it pointed at the ground (not in the air) and unload it before handing it to anyone else.

Not sure what the equivalent for AI should be yet.

I think the closer parallel is social media.

I grew up in the south. Of course.

There are lots of "dangerous" things. Kitchen knives at Target, cars and roads and highways, subway stations, mountains, strong tides, fire, falling. I think we're perfectly capable of surviving in this landscape.

We evolved to explore this landscape. Stop living in Disneyland plastic bubbles. Step outside into the dangerous world. Dream about the impossible.

I'm far more worried about social media and gamification/exploitation of emotions and insecurities. Our billion year old biology can survive in the wild - it isn't so great at dealing with the algorithm.

Somebody never read Amusing Ourselves to Death

I'm not OP, but it seems to me that LLMs offer extraordinary access to new skills and information to the uninitiated. Someone who has a positive experience creating a game like this is only a question away from learning details of how it was implemented, the language used, the architectural choices and rationale, etc. The LLM is a competent tutor in all. What I would have given as a child for such access... I had to make due with the help docs, and an occasional book from the library.

> "...only a question away from learning details of how it was implemented..."

That question will never be asked and we all know it. It's been demonstrated time and time again that the masses prefer entertainment to enlightenment and it is still being demonstrated today by the high rate of AI assisted cheating in high schools and colleges.

When I was a kid I did not understand what Game Genie "cheat codes" were doing, but it did not stop my curiosity and ultimate understanding of what was happening behind the scenes. This feels like the next iteration and I know _some_ kids will ask questions.

> That question will never be asked and we all know it.

I asked that question today. After years of working in Unity, I finally downloaded Unreal and spun up a quick game literally so I could poke around how it was implemented, and have been asking questions nonstop about what, how, and why things were implemented with a hands-on experiment.

Lots of people won't ask that question, but also lots of people most certainly will.

Worse. IF they DO ask the question, the answer is now

> You prompt a LLM and it just happens.

The bar for enlightenment is now further away as people are taught to expressively stop chasing it.

> That question will never be asked and we all know it.

You and I know different children. Mine give me the opposite impression. The questions have no end. I think that's a good thing.

Literally every child asks questions nonstop. In the vast majority of cases, that doesn't stick into adulthood.

I'm kind of hopeful that the "always helpful and courteous" personality of LLMs unless pushed intentionally will lead to more positive experiences around inquisitiveness in the youth. And more ability to retain it into adulthood. Even though I'm unsure about the second-order effects on human-human interaction.

why should they learn it? for what purpose? We used to learn these things so that we could use that knowledge to create more. now there's no reason to learn it, other than pure curiosity.

Why should you learn anything? Because it helps you ask better questions, and gives you more and different experience to draw connections between things and situations and ideas. It lets you do more stuff, and doing stuff is fun.

Having recently sat with a bunch of non-coders who decided to play with Claude Code—they learned more in an afternoon than they had in a lifetime, just because it was fun for it to get them to a thing they wanted. Versus months of drudgery and study as the price of entry (and an end result that would probably be super janky compared to the consumer products on offer to them).

I learned some about carpentry by reading, and by watching videos. I learned much more, much faster, by picking up bits of wood and tools and just doing. I did little dumb stuff that was trash but that was mine, and that was satisfying enough that I did more, and before I knew it I’d backed my way into picking up some scraps of proper technique.

And now so many more people with a vague itch can “just do” in relation to software systems.

I mean. Nerds have always existed and will always exist. But, the last couple of decades, it's just been fashionable to "be nerdy". They're faking it. So you're right: Most people won't. But there are reasons why people think people should or would, even if those reasons are wrong. I'm very cynical in my advanced age about peoples' willingness to learn things. All those "go into STEM" efforts aimed at little kids are just fluff. Most people don't enjoy learning. They hate it. Most people just want to watch TV in bed. AI is an amazing teacher, but most people don't want to learn. They're averse to it in their bones. It's like that t-shirt with the picture of french fries on it that says "not everyone can be an astronaut": Yeah well not everyone can be a nerd.

I first learned to program in middle school with Logo, and the extent of that was "telling the commander" (or whatever the term was) what to do in almost plain english.

That's one of the things that got me into learning to write code in the first place.

As long as the child in question gets to explore their creativity like this and it instills that sense of learning and diving deep then I'm not sure there's a problem here.

When I was a kid I got into programming to make games and websites partly because of the challenge of it. It was quite difficult to do and whenever you made something work it felt very rewarding.

Well now why would anybody bother writing that code by hand? Perception will/has shifted very quickly to coding being something that is simply done by AI with human oversight.

If I was a kid now maybe I would be using AI to create games or something but I think I would probably just get bored quickly and never bother to learn coding.

Sure, but I have gone from enthusiastically recommending a career in programming to being very cautiously optimistic that the strong kids will still find a place.

Not learning to code might be ok; maybe they can learn to fix John Deere tractors instead.

> very cautiously optimistic that the strong kids will still find a place.

Well yeah I mean that's always going to hold true if we are just talking about things in general

> maybe they can learn to fix John Deere tractors instead.

Yes these roles will probably shift to hardware more and more. But it's very different, much harder/impossible to teach yourself to the same level as you can with coding. The knowledge I gained staying up until 2am writing Flash games transferred directly to my career in software engineering

>The first thing I felt when I saw this post was concern on the impact of this type of thing on the mental development of children.

What impact did being able to take a picture have on the mental development of children?

Recording a moment went from something you needed a court painter and two weeks to do, to something that everyone could do with the click of a button.

A century later kids are still happy to draw things.

Counterpoint, I think it’ll get them more into making things, because they don’t have that big frustrating period where their output is nowhere near as interesting as the giant smorgasbord of interesting stuff being pushed on them constantly. I’d much rather they spend their time making stuff with AI than passively consume the garbage streaming on the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon 24/7, which was the status quo with my generation. Making can now compete on instant gratification with all the other stuff now.

When you buy your kid a cake for his birthday, do you think that it's hurting the development of his baking skill, because now he knows cakes are something that he can just hire someone to make with money?

I mean… it was a birthday present. Everything in moderation, and there are a lot of ways to involve the kids in the process more.

I definitely have some concerns about AI, but I would much rather my kid is actively involved in the game design process than playing the “buy more gems to level up!” casinos in the App Store wastelands.

I don't think this effects the kids more than playing any other video game.

> concern on the impact of this type of thing on the mental development of children.

Do we, or our children, ever learn to farm, mine, chop wood, lay bricks, make operating systems, or program in assembly language?

Does that affect or limit your or your children's ability to eat food, sit on chairs, sleep in beds, or use computers and phones?

> Do we, or our children, ever learn to farm, mine, chop wood, lay bricks, make operating systems, or program in assembly language?

Speak for your own childhood buddy

Yeah I for one make my children design and code every video game they play by hand. And before you ask, yes, in assembly.

the crazier possibility is that little kids' drawing skills - whatever pedagogical value that has, i agree that it has some - may stop improving, but there might be way more videogames authored by them that turn out to be really good.

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