Just like many forms of content there's an appropriate age. The problem with AI, with regards to kids, is it's as wide as the internet.

There's lots of great parts. My kids ask great questions and get even better, accurate answers; moreso than I can give. But then, there's lots of parts that shouldn't be introduced until later with other parts arguably not introduced at all. I've met kids who have unfettered internet access at age 10, and the results aren't great.

It's all there, just a question away - just like the internet.

“In February 2024, 14-year-old Sewell Setzer III died by suicide after forming an intense emotional and romantic attachment to a Character.AI chatbot modeled after Daenerys Targaryen ("Dany"). His mother, Megan Garcia, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Character.AI and Google, which settled confidentially in January 2026.

In April 2025, 16-year-old Adam Raine died by suicide after months of private conversations with ChatGPT-4o where he confided about self-harm and suicidal ideation. His parents filed a wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that the model provided specific methods and discouraged him from disclosing his distress to his mother.”

Those are the ones we know about. There are probably others that didn’t result in suicide but in other emotional problems.

Having said that, my son and I had tremendous fun with Sora when it was around.

Guns are a technology, are you going to let them play with that too?

Everyone on this site can feel the effect that AI is having on their brain. There is a very real tension between the power of AI and the cognitive impact it has from using it that needs to be talked about. Pretending that isn't real or shouldn't be taken seriously doesn't help.

Somebody never read Amusing Ourselves to Death

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.

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.

> 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. I think that's a good thing.

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. It lets you do more stuff, and doing stuff is fun.

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 super janky compared to the consumer products on offer to them).

I learned some about carpentry by reading, and by watching videos. I learned much more, much faster, by picking up bits of wood and tools and just doing. I did little dumb stuff that was trash but that was mine, and that was satisfying enough that I did more, and before I knew it I’d backed my way into picking up some scraps of proper technique.

And now so many more people with a vague itch can “just do” in relation to software systems.

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 an 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.

Can you please stop posting curmudgeonly comments, shallow dismissals, and even personal attacks (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50433292)?

These things are against HN's guidelines, and you've unfortunately been doing them repeatedly. This is not what HN is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

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.

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.

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

Sure, but I have gone from enthusiastically recommending a career in programming to being very cautiously optimistic that the strong kids will still find a place.

Not learning to code might be ok; maybe they can learn to fix John Deere tractors instead.