Hey Dev.to! I'm a 10-year developer and stay-at-home mom. This is about the day I realized everything I learned about coding might be obsolete, and...
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I hope this is just a clickbait post. Why should a two-year-old be in front of a screen “shipping” and “vibe coding”? I’m asking as a father of a 2-year-old.
What happened to letting kids be kids? Why are we rushing them into adult concepts when they should be learning through play, building with blocks, and discovering the world around them? The tech industry’s obsession with starting early seems to ignore what’s actually best for child development.
I appreciate your concern as a parent of a 2-year-old too! We actually spend most of our time on exactly what you mentioned: playing with blocks, digging up rocks (his collection weighs more than he does now 😅), reading stories, and he’s super into building 3D wood puzzles right now.
The computer time is maybe 10-15 minutes when it happens, and it IS play for him. It’s like digital blocks he can build with. He's creating, not consuming.
I think the main difference is we’re not teaching “coding” or pushing adult concepts. We’re just using a tool that lets his imagination become something he can see. When he says “make the car green!” and it happens, that joy is pure kid magic.
Kids naturally want to do what they see their parents doing. Since I work with computers, he’s curious about them too. But trust me, he’s way more interested in his 3D puzzles than anything on a screen!
That's thoughtful!
I wonder if "the new way of developing" will attract a different kind of people than "the old way" did/does - less nerdy/geeky/one-dimensional?
You also gotta wonder if there won't inevitably be a shift from software dev being done by "developers" to it largely being done by "business people", or subject matter experts?
Or will it still be 'developers' doing this work, but with a very different approach and mindset ...
Will there still be a place for, not so much remembering programming language syntax, but understanding fundamental system concepts e.g. relating to the internet and the web - HTTP etcetera ... or will even that largely be irrelevant?
My hypothesis is that fundamental concepts (masters in computer science stuff) will become specialized knowledge. Most people working in software development won't ever need this knowledge, but a small handful of people working on specific systems will be in great demand for having it.
Today's top product managers will become tomorrow's top individual contributors. The better you are at communicating (with people or machines) the more success you'll have.
Well I think you're right - all of that "low level" stuff increasingly gets abstracted away, to the extent that it hardly matters anymore - that means the profession changes a LOT, and you could argue it won't be the same profession anymore, but a fundamentally different one ...
Maybe for a lot of "development" we won't actually need "developers" anymore - business people or subject matter experts might be able to do most or all of it ... or, they would still be "developers", but a completely different breed, with very different skill sets, and attracting a different kind of people.
I wonder if a new/different "refuge" will have to be found for the nerds/geeks among us? ;-)
P.S. I think you're completely right in not trying to teach your 2 year old how to "code" - I think it would be a futile endeavor, and pretty much guaranteed to turn him off ... ;-)
As an engineering student, your post is insightful. I'm also learning game development with GDevelop, a no-code engine, so I have to focus purely on logic. when I got into engineering, I had a simple plan: use existing game or app code, modify it, add other functions, and then ship it. Then came AI, which makes such things 1000 times easier because now I don't need a team of 10 people or months to complete my project. However, learning to code is still important because AI models can hallucinate, like creating their own libraries that don't exist
First of all, I commend you for getting your 2-year-old to sit still long enough to join you in this exercise. This is indeed a lovely story about spending time with your kid before they enter an age where they hate everything you might try to get them to do.
I apologize in advance for raining on this parade, but to me, this story is tarnished by a couple of underlying horrors that I think you are ignoring. If you don't want to hear my criticisms, please read no further.
The first horror is that your son (and my daughter!) will grow up in a world teetering on the brink of environmental collapse. Even if it's a collapse we can manage to stave off, the damage we are doing is going to have long-term consequences, and it's not just ignored by the companies providing AI, but in many cases it's directly caused by them. Your son might grow up in a world where he has to purchase clean drinking water because of our rampant consumerism, for example.
Of course the other easy criticism is about the lack of creativity in what you've created. I took a look at the games you've "made", and it's impossible to call them anything but simplistic and derivative. Maybe you already know this, but maybe you don't! Because one truth about AI in development is that it's entirely possible to use it to create derivative works without knowing you're doing so. Aside from the environmental impact, I find this to be one of the most damning shortcomings of the technology. Certainly your son doesn't know he's done something so pointless, but you should know (and almost certainly already do know) that better games exist in the world already.
The joy sparked by seeing something you had a hand in creating is real, and quite palpable. But I think you'd be better off fostering that effect by buying him some crayons. Or let him build things in the dirt outside... while that's still an option.
He's two, so that's fine, and it's a great place to start. But it's only a start.
Does he care that I hacked his game so that I can make my car fly or pass through objects and made the car black?
Because I did.
It's a cute browser-based game, and awesome for a two-year-old to build, and see that he can use a computer to make something cool.
But, it's only a start. Because if all he ever learns is how to prompt the LLM, he's never going to learn to actually build a game that people use for more than a silly diversion.
Please don't misunderstand what I'm saying. Because I think this is awesome. I think it's great that LLMs have introduced your kid to computers at this early an age. But this is not the end of programming. This is a great way to introduce him to programming concepts so that he can actually learn to code in the future. Because as long as there are computers, there will be programmers. We're not getting replaced by prompters.
That's super fun! Can you post a screenshot next time? I bet he'd love to see it
Now he wants to make a flying car game 😂
By the way:
I first introduced my kids to programming by getting them to hack Cookie Clicker, although they were much older than yours.
I have to say this was super interesting.
The idea behind everybody should learn how to code is not only about learning a syntax, but learning how to think in an organized way.
Coding is just enough abstraction to make something quick without consequences.
With plumbing you also need to be organized, but the consequences can be bad if you test it in your own house.
I don't think the syntax is bagage. You can't check the application if you can't read how it works.
It is like reading a comic without text. You can figure out the main story, but none of the side lines and nuances.
I think that education is too focused on data retention. Math should teach logic but for a lot of people, me included, it is an abstraction too far. And that is where coding can come in as a tool to teach logic.
While I think vibe coding is good to learn how to communicate. But once you start "prompt engineering" you took it a step too far. Communication amongst people should be the focus. Talking to a machine should be a side effect.
I think we agree more than we disagree! You're absolutely right that coding teaches logic and abstraction - mine certainly improved from the 10 years I spent doing it.
What I'm suggesting is that AI tools now let us teach those same concepts (logic, systematic thinking, breaking down problems) without the syntax barrier. My 2-year-old is learning iteration, debugging, and precise communication (all the important parts you mention) just through natural language instead of code.
Your comic analogy is perfect. Traditional coding is like making kids learn how to draw comics before they can tell stories. AI lets them start with the story itself.
I love that you brought up communication being key. That's exactly what we're focusing on. When my son has to explain what he wants clearly enough for the AI to build it, he's learning the same systematic thinking that coding teaches. He just gets to see results in minutes instead of months.
Maybe the real shift is from "everybody should code" to "everybody should understand how to think systematically and communicate" - whether that's through Python or plain English?
This website was once good, but now is full of these clickbait articles with the worst type of Linkedin delusional bs. Yes, sure.. your 2 years old kid knows what a browser is and wrote a prompt to an AI mentioning it.
EXACTLY ;)
GENAI is kind of ok but to burst a bubble its not likely GenAI that your son has access to is going to get much better without destroying the earth.
Meanwhile your son can eat mash potatoes and a few years outperform the AI in certain tasks.
So curb your enthusiasm your son may grow up to not want anything to do with tech probably after you grow up you will also have a similar sentiment.
The real world is far more interesting.
I disagree that being a software engineer will be worthless in the future. I believe it will be more important than ever as more and more people forget that fundamental concepts are what matter in this. You cannot properly conduct an orchestra without understanding music and what each player in the orchestra does. Standing up on stage and wildly flailing your arms might seem like it's the same thing, but it certainly is not, nor will the orchestra give you the same results.
It's like the people who only know ORM's and don't know SQL. Sure, that works 80% of the time, but the other 20% of the time is what's going to cause 95% of your serious pain points with the data, and ORM's cannot abstract that away, you will have to get in there in SQL and figure it out. You can't debug what you can't see.
I am not an AI hater; in fact, the opposite. I use it every day at work, integrated into our IDE's in the form of Co-Pilot. I use it to help proofread, brainstorm, and act as a copy editor for my books and blog posts. I use it to help write unit tests, doc strings, and to set up and remove relevant console logs at lightning speed for debugging, which has been awesome to help speed things up.
But at the end of the day, AI is only as good as the person prompting it. If you can't prompt it with precision and you can't understand what it's giving you as output, you are simply putting yourself in a boat of "I guess this is right because it says it is".
And that's not good enough for production and never will be. There are also pretty severe limitations with AI, especially as you get into any kind of complex systems, 3rd party integrations, proxy layers, etc, where it's virtually useless or will have you chasing your tail for hours in a circle if you let it. I'd say it's helpful for roughly 30% of what I do on a day-to-day basis.
Right now, we are at a saturation point with what is possible, meaning we are close to the "best" we can get with the current way things are done, so unless there is some sort of major change in how these work, things probably are not going to improve all that much in the near future. It will simply be a lot of "bells and whistles," adding, like the Madden Video Game series for football, where most years are minor updates and "cool things," but it doesn't fundamentally improve anything in the game itself.
Such a lovely read. I can't wait him to replace me in tech! <3
Haha thanks Shrijal! It may be a few years yet 😅 What should we work on next... get him taking Jira tickets? 😝
After a few Jira tickets, by next year he’ll be rewriting my scripts in Rust 😂