I don't know about that. My son is about 13. He's got into coding using godot and initially built a few games in Javascript (via. a book which I worked through with him). Then, he picked up Godot from tutorials online and recently has built something multiplayer. He asked for a Claude subscription for his last birthday and since then has been doing all the parts he enjoys by hand (combat mechanics etc.) but using Claude to do things like trailers, website aesthetics, sound effects etc. It's been nice and the results are impressive. e.g. one of his first games was a simple hangman. Now, he added a keyboard to that via Claude so that it can be played using a browser.

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.

I am still imoressed by hand-painted signs in Nepal and India - enough to take many pictures of them - even though AI-generated signs are now everywhere.

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.

I got zero praise for my preteen coding experiments. Notably, I made a really simple clone of a popular JRPG battle and was so excited to show it to a family friend who was a programmer; he "Okay, kid"ed me and that was the end of my enthusiasm for it.

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.

It's truly awful. Best case, they go on and start tinkering and fixing and learning. What is more likely and awful is they will sit there pulling the dopamine lever and get hooked on using AI to do everything difficult.

Maybe doing something with an LLM soon won't count as "I did it" at all. Just like you can't impress your peers by taking someone else's work and saying you did it, you won't impress them with something an LLM did for you. But you can still impress with things you actually do yourself.

It’s a different medium altogether

That’s like saying they will never impress anyone by discovering a continent

That ship has sailed

I agree. But I think the problems have now just moved. What is 'hard' is different. I don't think we've collectively grasped that yet. We're going to need to use our imagination and show others when we find something. I'm looking forward to what we can solve, I just hope the opportunity and benefit is well distributed.

tbh, make-your-own-games software has been around for decades, most of which much simpler than creating a "real" game - Roblox comes to mind first and foremost, but it goes as far back as ZZT.

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.

over-achievement society in the words of Byung-chul Han.

Try to go back before our era though. In the early age of computers, computers were basically really big one-way calculators that could execute an algorithm and output a result. In this context a kid creating a program to output the fibonacci sequence would have been quite impressive. But by our era, we needed to be able to produce basic text games to impress. Did we really lose anything in the process? I don't think so.

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.

Seriously. I remember coding something in Macromedia Flash to impress my computer-illiterate parents. It was silly but it was all mine. I am sad that I will never see that for the future generation, not this way at least. The bar is too high now.

Never impress a parent/teacher?

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.

An old tech friend and I were talking a few years ago about hobbies, and how our old CTO was one of the most impressive hobbyists we knew of. Not only was he an incredibly accomplished exec but he also produced amazing YouTube content about his model railway collection and model rocket building all in a custom home where everything had custom smart interfaces with a growing family who enjoyed home cooked meals together on furniture he built himself.

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.

We absolutely can. See the Butlerian Jihad and Age of Strife as totally non-fictional examples.

> The world has changed and we can never go back.

This is always true.

Meh, now they can impress with something cooler.

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-...

An AI companion that acts impressed will be easy to provide if the winners see a benefit of doing so.

LLMs are exactly what I and my friend dreamed of when we were about 10. A tool that could make whatever game we dreamed of. I distinctly remember discussing it. Oh, what a horrible world to live in.

Not once did my boy ever impress me with his ability to program.

> I feel for kids growing up with LLMs like this. They will never impress a parent, teacher or peer with a simple “hello world” type text game, when the peer could generate a full multiplayer video game with a couple of prompts.

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.

They will just have to compete to see who can make the best GAME, I suppose.

I wouldn't be so pessimistic, its what they create by themselves that is valuable, not some meaningless comparisons. The road != result unless parents screw up badly. Don't forget comparison is the thief of joy.

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.

Not sure whar you are mourning. It is just that the bar has gotten stratosphericly higher, which is awesome.

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