Suppose she decides from the experience that she likes making games, and wants to expand on it. She wants to support more songs, different types of song sources, colorful animated backgrounds, flashy graphics, change how it scores, a hundred other things. But by the time she gets halfway through it claude just starts getting things wrong and making them worse, and it turns into a nightmare where she doesn't even know how to go back and going back doesn't fix the problem. Or going back undoes some things she did want along with all the stuff it broke, and now she has to do it all over again. She makes a change on one screen and it changes the behavior on a dozen others. Claude starts telling her that things are impossible, or that it did this because there was a comment that said she wanted it, or coming up with other weird complicated reasons, citing random lines of code, why this or that can't work. And then she decides that yeah, making things is an awful experience and she never wants to do it again.
You could just teach her some real project management skills. Show her how to put together documents and code hygiene rules. Setup some CI/CD pipelines and have sub-agents that can review the code as it gets generated. Introduce her to test driven development.
I think the fear is that a lot of this stuff will end up being load bearing. A lot more folks now know enough to be dangerous but not enough to know what to throw away.
Suppose she decides from the experience that she likes making games, and wants to expand on it. She wants to support more songs, different types of song sources, colorful animated backgrounds, flashy graphics, change how it scores, a hundred other things. But by the time she gets halfway through it claude just starts getting things wrong and making them worse, and it turns into a nightmare where she doesn't even know how to go back and going back doesn't fix the problem. Or going back undoes some things she did want along with all the stuff it broke, and now she has to do it all over again. She makes a change on one screen and it changes the behavior on a dozen others. Claude starts telling her that things are impossible, or that it did this because there was a comment that said she wanted it, or coming up with other weird complicated reasons, citing random lines of code, why this or that can't work. And then she decides that yeah, making things is an awful experience and she never wants to do it again.
You could just teach her some real project management skills. Show her how to put together documents and code hygiene rules. Setup some CI/CD pipelines and have sub-agents that can review the code as it gets generated. Introduce her to test driven development.
I think that would spoil a lot of the fun. I would favour visual and audio feedback loops to interactively learn how things work under the hood.
You mean the 8 year old shouldn't be thinking about how she will maintain this code when she's 15? This generation is lost.
I think the fear is that a lot of this stuff will end up being load bearing. A lot more folks now know enough to be dangerous but not enough to know what to throw away.
Load bearing, huh? I see you're becoming Claude himself.
You're right to push back
I thought I was the only one who realized how much Claude called things “load bearing”. I’ve mentioned it to colleagues and they hadn’t noticed.
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