Ah, the joy of building. Lately, my kids have acquired the bug. Now that they are a bit older, they’ve started to somewhat realize what I’m doing all day long, hunched over a brightly lit laptop — pecking away on a keyboard.
Click clack, clack clack, click click….boom, I made something. An app appears, and now they are at the age where they can comprehend that. And, well, they think that is amazing.
And thus, I’ve started to dip into the realm of kids and vibe coding. At first, I had an outline with something to say on this topic. But, you know what, I just threw it out. Both of my oldest kiddos, Benny (12) and Remy (9), have asked me to help them “make an app”, and we’ve had a blast.
What follows are just random observations in no particular order.
They have no idea what they’re doing
What even is an app to a kid? To them, anything entirely web-based for the whole experience is not an app (I raised them right!), and they were even surprised you could charge money on the web!
But, we all start somewhere. And, to that end, they’ve both taken completely different approaches to deciding where they should start. Remy, ever the analytical thinker among my kids, opted to spec it out. Benny? Two sheets to the wind, he just opened up Codex and let it rip. Which leads me to my first observation…
The prompts are just brutal
…and it’s somewhat endearing at the same time. Seeing Remy hunched over the keyboard, pecking away on one hand:
…just tossing Codex the most open-ended instructions imaginable:
So many questions! What kind of app? Which platform? FIVE BUCKS? We using StoreKit for this, what about paywalls? The seasoned engineer in me reeled, but I wanted them to hit as many bumps and learn how to work around them as they could. Even then, though, they do get “Dad Assists” here and there. And, Remy used his to kickstart his project:
In this case, I mentioned he might want to say what kind of app it is, punt the money stuff for now, and hint to the LLM which general direction we’re taking things (iOS, minimum target is likely iOS 26).
Writing prompt cleanups have been fantastic learning and bonding moments. We get to briefly talk about why I wrote something the way I did, I try to gently explain how an LLM works, what they’re good at, what they’re not as good at, etc.
To that end, their prompts have improved. But even then…
Ohhhh my, the UX
…these apps are brutal right now. Remy’s has, like, three search functions - all doing different things. I mean, check this number out:
It’s easy for us to spot the issues. However, the bit that’s surprised me, though, is that they are…aware of it? Even as a 9 year old. Is this a potential byproduct of growing up in the digital age? They know it doesn’t feel right, and they can’t really say why yet, they just know it feels off.
That’s hardly surprising, as design and user experience are things that take years and years to develop.
Their imagination is on steroids
The fact that they now live in a world where they can type in a box and get something working has, quite literally, ignited their creativity, curiosity, and excitement. The boys are huge fans of neal.fun, especially his fantastic auction game:
Remy, unshackled with unimaginable power at his disposal, immediately u-turned on a bug fix and just threw that at Codex and instructed it to add a Pokemon card version in his app. And, it came pretty close one-shotting it:
This is the good stuff. Being able to think of something fun and have it come to life. It’s the same dopamine hit you get from building with legos, finishing a picture, or generally constructing a thought and turning it into something tangible. While it’s silly in this context, these are the moments that will inspire them to continue.
The skills still pay
The one ephiphany I’ve had with all of this (aside from how insane it is that my kids can get a functioning app working) is that the skills we have are magnified now, perhaps more than ever. We’ve all been so uneasy about the implication of “anyone can make an app”, we haven’t stopped much to consider that our hard-earned skills are still the thing that makes a good app.
You can throw all the skill files you want at an LLM (And you should! They’re great!), but they still have critical limitations. Take text, for example. What would you instinctively do if you have a view whose text was truncated, clipping, or otherwise not fitting into a container?
The layman would say, “Can you make this text not clip?” The hardened iOS veteran might say, “Apply a .minimumScaleFactor modifier to this text, and ensure you’re using a Text style and not hard coding the font size.”
Off the cuff? Visually, you may get the same result at first. But, well — if you know, you know. One is objectively better. And those of us who can speak the language will still be making the best apps. The same skills still win, as I mentioned before, the tools have simply changed. It does, however, highlight my one lingering worry: That the next generation my take an ignorance through obstinance stance towards coding. If the ease of it all could tempt a kid (or anyone) to never bother learning how something truly works, they’d be missing out on some required skills.
The sweet spot
While the kids have been using Codex, I think I’d opt to stick them in Bitrig’s nascent mac app. It’s a bit more harnessed, in a good way, and I think the results would be a little better. The app Anything spun something up quick, in Expo. With Codex, I have a ton of credits, so we’ve stuck with that. Personally? I prefer Codex for coding anyways, especially since they put a frontend on top of the CLI. If it becomes a native mac app, I’ll probably never close it.
But for them? I can’t stop thinking about how a Macbook Neo with Bitrig would be a fun addition to the Morgan family. You kinda sorta need to make sure these kids don’t blow up your house with this stuff, which, well, depending on your permissions — could certainly happen.
Wrapping up
Reflecting on the vibe coding experiences with the kids, I only have one prevailing thought: we are all having so much fun. The kids are becoming increasingly interested in what their dad actually does for a career now. Remy, especially, is getting into it. He’s developed the ineluctable urge to make something. The last two days he has come home from school, it’s “Dad, can I work on my app!?” He even stuck some post-it notes to his closet so he wouldn’t forget what to work on the next day:
Until next time ✌️