And yet the child is not being taught any of those things, but is instead being given instant gratification slop before they're old enough to know better or develop. LLMs are useful tutors (significantly worse than expert private tutors but probably better than one public tutor per 30 or 40 students), but 99% of people aren't using them that way. If the OP article had been about teaching his nephew how to leverage LLMs to learn the skills he needed to make his own game, that would be a very different story.

Are you sure?

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.

[delayed]

I was a kid, and I have 2 of them. My experience has been kids curiosity works top down, not bottom up. As such, instant gratification turns into curiosity or wanting a slight variation or whatever, and bit by bit they learn.

Let the kids get burned out on vibecoded slop vidya. Maybe they'll get bored enough to start playing outside again.

Can you please stop posting curmudgeonly comments and shallow dismissals? All of this is against HN's guidelines, and you've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

why should they learn it? for what purpose? We used to learn these things so that we could use that knowledge to create more. now there's no reason to learn it, other than pure curiosity.

Why should you learn anything? Because it helps you ask better questions, and gives you more and different experience to draw connections between things and situations and ideas.

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).

I mean. Nerds have always existed and will always exist. But, the last couple of decades, it's just been fashionable to "be nerdy". They're faking it. So you're right: Most people won't. But there are reasons why people think people should or would, even if those reasons are wrong. I'm very cynical in my advanced age about peoples' willingness to learn things. All those "go into STEM" efforts aimed at little kids are just fluff. Most people don't enjoy learning. They hate it. Most people just want to watch TV in bed. AI is am amazing teacher, but most people don't want to learn. They're averse to it in their bones. It's like that t-shirt with the picture of french fries on it that says "not everyone can be an astronaut": Yeah well not everyone can be a nerd.

[delayed]

> That question will never be asked and we all know it.

You and I know different children. Mine give me the opposite impression. The questions have no end.

Literally every child asks questions nonstop. In the vast majority of cases, that doesn't stick into adulthood.

I'm kind of hopeful that the "always helpful and courteous" personality of LLMs unless pushed intentionally will lead to more positive experiences around inquisitiveness in the youth. And more ability to retain it into adulthood. Even though I'm unsure about the second-order effects on human-human interaction.

Worse. IF they DO ask the question, the answer is now

> 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.

When I was a kid I did not understand what Game Genie "cheat codes" were doing, but it did not stop my curiosity and ultimate understanding of what was happening behind the scenes. This feels like the next iteration and I know _some_ kids will ask questions.

> That question will never be asked and we all know 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.

What a cynical take on humanity