My Kid Doesn’t Know How Hard This Used to Be
02/16/2026
A little while back my son told me he wanted to make a video game. He’s 10. He wanted something his friends could play on their browsers at school a la coolmath. So we sat down, I opened up Claude, he described what he wanted, and about an hour later there was a working game on the internet with a URL he could share with his buddies. He didn’t write a single line of code.
He immediately started asking about more levels and a leaderboard. He did not once stop to appreciate how insane that was.
I did though. Because when I was his age, I spent an entire summer trying to build a Geocities page.
Barriers Have a Short Memory
Here’s the pattern I keep coming back to. Every few years, the barrier to entry for something important drops so dramatically that the next generation barely notices it was ever there. The people who grew up climbing the wall have already internalized the struggle, but the kids just walk right through.
I think about this with crypto constantly. When I first bought Bitcoin in 2012, I walked into a Bank of America, filled out a money order, mailed it to an exchange I’d never heard of, and prayed it would show up (I was probably a little crazy, tbh). Now you can buy it from your couch while watching Netflix. That barrier evaporated so completely that most people don’t even know it existed.
And now it’s happening with building software. Andrej Karpathy coined the term “vibe coding” about a year ago, the idea that you can describe what you want to an AI and just let it build, without ever looking at the code.
Collins Dictionary named it the Word of the Year for 2025. MIT Technology Review named generative coding one of its 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2026. And Karpathy himself already moved past the term, he’s calling it “agentic engineering” now, because the AI agents are doing pretty much all of the actual writing.
That wall I spent an entire summer trying to climb in the 90s? My 10-year-old walked right through it in an hour. Pretty wild when you think about it.
What My Kid Actually Taught Me
The thing that struck me wasn’t the technology, it was my son’s complete lack of awe about it. He didn’t marvel at the fact that he described a game and it materialized out of thin air. He just immediately started thinking about what to add next. More levels. Better graphics. A scoring system. His brain went straight to the creative part because the technical part was invisible to him.
I spent my childhood learning how to use the tools. My son is spending his childhood learning what to build with them. At the end of the day, I think that’s the most important shift happening right now. The question stopped being “can you figure out the tools?” and started being “what do you actually want to create?”
And to be honest, that’s a way better question for a 10-year-old to be answering.
The Feeling Hasn’t Changed
The first time my son saw his game running on a live URL, something he could actually send to his friends, he turned to me with this look. Not disbelief exactly, more like “wait, that’s actually mine?” I think about that a lot. Because I had that exact same feeling the first time my janky Geocities page loaded in a browser 25 years ago. The feeling of “I made this and it exists in the world now.”
The tools changed. The speed changed. The barriers changed. But a kid making something and being proud of it, that hasn’t changed one bit.
That’s all for today - I hope you have a great week!
BFG