alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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I think at that age your son was "lucky" in a way that he got into it fairly late, or "at the right time." like my generation was with mobile phones and Internet, appearing around our teenage years so we were slowly growing up alongside the technical and cultural evolution.
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).
Love the retro feel to it. He even has a guestbook. I was about 13 when I created my first website. Of course that was in the days when it all needed to be done by hand and there weren't really programming languages for the web yet. Hope he keeps at it!
Completely agree, looks like 13 - 14 yo is the right age to dab in both side (traditional coding and LLM assisted coding) for instance, my son (13 yo), knows a bit of coding (python, javascript, roblox, etc.) and some experience, but giving him Claude Code with Godot MCP was the true unlock, he spend so much time building his own gam, focusing on the aesthetics, gaming mechanism, story line, overall effects and look and feel:
This just proves the point more than anything, really.
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"?
I love the idea of your kid publishing a website… just make sure you store versions of that thing over the years!
Wondering if you thought about the effects that AI exposure can have on a young brain? Adults are experiencing brain rot, do you think kids could have it even worse?
Honest question, I don’t mean that sarcastically. Wondering if AI exposure will be compared to doomscrolling social media in the future.