The New Yorker:

The narrative of boom and bust is familiar—but also out of step with the possibilities of a new technology.

By Joshua Rothman

Over the past few months, I’ve introduced artificial intelligence into the hobby life of my seven-year-old son, Peter. On Saturdays, he takes a coding class, in which he recently made a version of rock-paper-scissors, and he really wants to make more sophisticated games at home. I gave ChatGPT and Claude a sense of his skill level, and they instantaneously suggested next steps. Claude proposed trying to recreate Pong in Scratch, a coding environment for kids. We downloaded it, and I sat in an armchair, with ChatGPT on my iPad, while Peter gave the project a shot on the computer. Whenever he got stuck, I answered his questions, drawing either on my own programming knowledge or on A.I. He finished a rudimentary version of the game in about an hour.

In the following weeks, with further help from me and A.I., Peter made a game based on the light-cycle duels in the movie “Tron,” complete with music and a score-keeping system. He sketched the beginnings of a “library simulator,” and finished his own arcade game, Dot in Space, about a tiny spaceship travelling at warp speed. Whenever he hit a potentially momentum-killing bump in the road, A.I. enabled us to roll through it. At my request, the systems began pointing us toward more sophisticated coding environments—Construct, GDevelop, Godot Engine, GameMaker—and suggesting more ambitious projects. Last weekend, he stayed up late, programming a polished version of Asteroids while wolfing down Cheerios and gulping from his water bottle as though it were an energy drink.

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