What’s your honest appraisal of this code? Would you ever under any circumstances use it? If not, then be honest and tell them to keep pushing. The quote is that it is not much “yet”. It’s a good first step, but having too high of a self-appraisal is just as bad as having too low. As an elementary school kid I worked for several years on a BASIC game where you could fly an ASCII art ship around the screen. It was not good, and I would have been better off if some adult had been honest and told me that I was doing it wrong and sent me down a better path. Instead I thought I was hot shit because I was the best programmer at my school. It wasn’t until years after college that I really even began to understand programming, and having too high a self-conception hurt me for a long time.