My intro to game dev as an 10 year old was learning to use my cousins C64, writing some BASIC text based games. It was pure joy discovering programming that way.

It is utterly depressing to think that kids will never take that path again. Instead, we will get pulling the slot machine lever, zero skill, zero effort, nothing gained.

"Creating something" now means typing a few text sentences in to some prompt and paying money to these companies that want to essentially make humanity redundant. Instant gratification, no hard earned skills at the end. Compare this to the kid building something themselves with scratch, improving on it, moving on to Godot etc.

The AI boosters in here saying how amazing this is are being incredibly short sighted.

Anyone doing this with their kids: please take a moment to think about the implications of what you are doing. Even explain to your kids what an LLM is, the moral implications (massivley capital funded companies have stolen so much content to make this possible and now want to sell it back to us) and the importance of effort and learning real skills.