The world has changed and we can never go back.
He's been publishing his work at https://waitinggodot.in/
My younger one has been creating little things on a microbit using the block based environment online. He's enjoying it too.
Honest question, I don’t mean that sarcastically. Wondering if AI exposure will be compared to doomscrolling social media in the future.
My main barrier against this has been to talk with him regularly about this. Amplify the positives rather than warn about the negatives so that the first gets done more and the latter gets atrophied.
It makes no sense to do bans when everyone else will grow up with LLMs.
"Everyone else is doing this obviously bad thing to their children, so I might as well do it to my child too!"
Brain rot is not a serious term… anything can become a problem if it’s done too much and often compared to ‘other things’
If you grow up with it already established and before there are any cultural safeguards based on long time exposure and experience, it's a different matter. Like the newer generations growing up addicted to social media, which is only now starting to change for the better (hopefully).
Both the website's design and the games presented look indistinguishable from every other AI-generated website and game I've seen in the past. I do not feel any sense of individuality while looking at them, they could've been prompted by just about anyone. Even the little text blurbs are plain unfiltered Claudeslop ("no spoilers, just green and red squares").
Any one of your son's peers could create something identical by typing "claude, make me a cool website with some games" and waiting an hour or two, and that's the problem. How do you think he would feel if he showed this to one of his friends, hoping to impress them, and one day later, that same friend approached him and said "look, I made a website exactly like yours, it was so easy"?
Competition and one-upmanship to that level in kids has existed since the internet became widespread. The solution is to build something even better the next time you show something to that friend.
Just like sports, music, grades. Once the bar is raised, the top performers just keep getting better.
Have you played competitive sports in your life? The kids who practiced more, had more opportunities to practice, grew up around athletes in the home, etc. will also have that "I can do exactly what you did. That's easy!" attitude. That's normal.
If you get instantly discouraged by others making your hard work look easy, then you don't have enough drive.
There was a local contest where I am and his entry for that was his latest game which has multiplayer support over the net. He set up a server on a VPS for this. https://waitinggodot.in/games/legends-of-crumbs.html
My watercolours still impress people enough to get requested even though they're fairly mediocre.
I can't imagine not being impressed by something made by _the person that I created_ because a machine can spit out a neater version of it.
Other communities are more protective of human output. For example, you'll get chased with pitchforks from the watercolor community if you post anything that smells of AI. But in tech, the number of people you can impress with human creativity has diminished by orders of magnitude.
However is this how the rest of the world works? Moreso than before?
There are countless examples of things where your kid is going to get walloped by comparison. So, don't compare. Make the effort to meet them where they are and praise them for their effort and focus and passion, not their output. Judy and Elroy will be okay as long as you realize kids and their needs don't change much even as the world does.
They don't need to impress a parent/teacher/peer, life kinda sucks if you search for or need external validation. Especially if, as you say, someone's own creation is overshadowed by something 100x shinier.
That’s like saying they will never impress anyone by discovering a continent
That ship has sailed
And now too the impressive demo isn't going to be just making an interactive or multiplayer game which anybody can do with a single prompt, but creating something that's actually interesting/fun. Interestingly enough this now overlaps quite well with the sort of stuff that could be monetized today. That's why I think LLMs are going to throw a curveball in the economy in ways many aren't yet appreciating.
If they made it the old way, without LLMs, I guarantee most parents/teachers who have real (pre-2025) programming experience will still be impressed.
Are kids doing photography also not impressive because smartphone cameras all default to full-auto, computational processed modes? Obviously not. You can still stand out just by giving more effort and being more detail-oriented. The average smartphone photo taker doesn't even know how to utilize focal lengths effectively.
You're in a bubble. Go look at what actual kids are doing. Only the actually extemely motivated/smart ones are generating playable full-multiplayer games from raw code (AKA not in another game's sandbox); even with claude/codex.
Built himself? Well, designed by him and built in his home workshop. Some of it done by him at least with his assistants. They had a home chef too of course who gave the kids a bowl of stuff to mix during prep. The model railway involved design work that was more like commissioning 3D prints and model assembly. Input on the design really, as a lot of it was handled by assistants. Assistants assisting assistants based on prompts and review and feedback. Everything was custom and bespoke and made in his vision. Almost the entirety of the labor and craftwork were outsourced.
This person was a great leader — or “orchestrator” in the language of agents — but a lot of his accomplishments boiled down to having the physical world equivalent of a massive token budget: money and staff.
The great scientists of the 19th century, the ones whom we named fundamental units after, had skilled craftsmen who cut precision screw threads and blew perfect glass for them. Major scientific leaps are written up on papers authored by department leads et al. Les chefs célebres of the world front a kitchen filled with skilled staff supporting the name over the door.
If your work can be done on a computer though, AI can provide you with a Python line cook or a C++ glassblower of your own, so you can’t just show us your perfectly julienned potatoes or evaporation flask and expect us to praise anything other than your wallet, and your ability to motivate robots to do your bidding.
This is always true.
Its like saying there is no reason to hand draw anything since computers can generate a better picture. My kids love drawing, painting and other physical endeavors. Of course we don't drown them in screens, we may fail them somehow in future but not like that.
I spent so much of my youth building things that were far beneath what I wanted to be building because it took all my time/energy/attention/expertise to build the lesser thing.
It's a far better deal to saturate your time on the high-level stuff building the ambitious thing you really want to exist. e.g. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/-quot-the-door-problem-...
We’re entering into a new era of mankind. With good and bad consequences.
Adults are also desensitized to impressive deliverables. We see it even among peers who barely bat an eye when someone goes above and beyond to deliver a feature. The toxic ones even try to downplay your achievements by throwing around claims that your deliverables were vibecoded.
I along with most of HN probably had a new idea every month for a game or software back in the day. 12 year old me could only dream to maybe work on something tangential to them in the next twenty years or even a lifetime. Now i could prototype most of those ideas as i thought them up and really get into the promising ones.
I feel like i was born too late and missed out, straight up jealous of the possibilities in front of the kids willing to take it