I definitely have some concerns about AI, but I would much rather my kid is actively involved in the game design process than playing the “buy more gems to level up!” casinos in the App Store wastelands.
The kid is doing game design with hand drawn sketches and game mechanic, as now he has his own team of software engineers and artists to make his vision a reality.
Having recently sat with a bunch of non-coders who decided to play with Claude Code—they learned more in an afternoon than they had in a lifetime, just because it was fun for it to get them to a thing they wanted. Versus months of drudgery and study as the price of entry (and an end result that would probably be janky compared to the consumer products on offer to them).
You and I know different children. Mine give me the opposite impression. The questions have no end.
> You prompt a LLM and it just happens.
The bar for enlightenment is now further away as people are taught to expressively stop chasing it.
I asked that question today. After years of working in Unity, I finally downloaded Unreal and spun up a quick game literally so I could poke around how it was implemented, and have been asking questions nonstop about what, how, and why things were implemented with a hands-on experiment.
Lots of people won't ask that question, but also lots of people most certainly will.
That's one of the things that got me into learning to write code in the first place.
As long as the child in question gets to explore their creativity like this and it instills that sense of learning and diving deep then I'm not sure there's a problem here.
Well now why would anybody bother writing that code by hand? Perception will/has shifted very quickly to coding being something that is simply done by AI with human oversight.
If I was a kid now maybe I would be using AI to create games or something but I think I would probably just get bored quickly and never bother to learn coding.
Not learning to code might be ok; maybe they can learn to fix John Deere tractors instead.
Well yeah I mean that's always going to hold true if we are just talking about things in general
> maybe they can learn to fix John Deere tractors instead.
Yes these roles will probably shift to hardware more and more. But it's very different, much harder/impossible to teach yourself to the same level as you can with coding. The knowledge I gained staying up until 2am writing Flash games transferred directly to my career in software engineering
Well the cost does add up...
Basically, I think it's okay to have a bit of fun playing AI-generated video games at your techie uncle's house, and their parents agree. And for what it's worth, Aiden drew every character and boss himself - the game was built from his drawings.
My nephews are otherwise very active, learning music, martial arts, and other sports. But when they visit, I let them play games in between other activities. My parents refused to let me play any video games at home, and I still think that was really lame. Video games are another art form to be appreciated - they just need to be enjoyed in moderation.
Generally, though, I worry about the future and the potential for cognitive decline that comes from having AI agents do everything. I don't have a good answer here, except that I suspect we'll have to intersperse AI use with periods of deliberate daily cognitive struggle to avoid decline.
Jesus Christ, let the kids play with technology. No parent or relative needs to apologize for kids having fun with AI.
My kids will be fine tuning models.
There are lots of "dangerous" things. Kitchen knives at Target, cars and roads and highways, subway stations, mountains, strong tides, fire. I think we're perfectly capable of surviving in this landscape.
We evolved to explore this landscape. Stop living in Disneyland plastic bubbles. Step outside into the dangerous world. Dream about the impossible.
There's lots of great parts. Then there's lots of parts that shouldn't be introduced until later and parts that arguably not introduced at all. I've met kids who have unfettered internet access at age 10, and the results aren't great.
Introducing AI should be done in a controlled way - similar to the internet.
What impact did being able to take a picture have on the mental development of children?
Recording a moment went from something you needed a court painter and two weeks to do, to something that everyone could do with the click of a button.
A century later kids are still happy to draw things.
Do we, or our children, ever learn to farm, mine, chop wood, lay bricks, make operating systems, or program in assembly language?
Does that affect or limit your or your children's ability to eat food, sit on chairs, sleep in beds, or use computers and phones?
Speak for your own childhood buddy
The first thing I felt when I saw this post was concern on the impact of this type of thing on the mental development of children. For example developing specific skills like drawing, and general emotional skills like concentration and learning to be happy with their own skill level.
I respect it was a light post where your aim was probably to highlight something fun, but I couldn't see any note of what you thought about it.
What do you think about that? What do his parents think?