I’ve written before about how November 2025 was an inflection point for coding agents—the point where Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.1 crossed a tipping point that meant their respective coding agents …
When I was a kid making games in my free time after school, I started with https://scratch.mit.edu/ with stick figures and pictures from Google images edited in GIMP. When I learned a bit of real programming I worked with shapes, crude art made in GIMP, or stuff my more artistically talented friends contributed. I did some of my own folly work, recorded with my phone’s microphone and edited in Audacity for sound effects. I poked around in Garage Band until i created something I was happy with for music.
I think there’s a lot to learn in that kind of process that would absolutely be lost if I could have just asked AI for some slop and called that good. The learning and growth that comes from the process of doing something as a hobby is what makes it worth doing, not the output.
What if the thing they want to do, and get better at doing, is game design and not C++?
If they want to design games (quests, dialogs, class design, level layout) they can do that now, without needing to learn how to draw or studying programming beforehand.
For some projects it doesn’t matter if the art is terrible and the code is a mess, it just needs to be functional enough.
Learn a bit yourself. You’ll be a better artist/game designer/programmer if you have some understanding of the other parts and how they all fit together
use purpose-built tools like game engines or RPG maker. You will learn a lot more (and result in a much better product) using RPG Maker than using AI
you will have more control (and be forced to learn more by having to make more decisions) about game design using the above techniques than using AI
When I was a kid making games in my free time after school, I started with https://scratch.mit.edu/ with stick figures and pictures from Google images edited in GIMP. When I learned a bit of real programming I worked with shapes, crude art made in GIMP, or stuff my more artistically talented friends contributed. I did some of my own folly work, recorded with my phone’s microphone and edited in Audacity for sound effects. I poked around in Garage Band until i created something I was happy with for music.
I think there’s a lot to learn in that kind of process that would absolutely be lost if I could have just asked AI for some slop and called that good. The learning and growth that comes from the process of doing something as a hobby is what makes it worth doing, not the output.
What if the thing they want to do, and get better at doing, is game design and not C++?
If they want to design games (quests, dialogs, class design, level layout) they can do that now, without needing to learn how to draw or studying programming beforehand.
For some projects it doesn’t matter if the art is terrible and the code is a mess, it just needs to be functional enough.
There are so many existing games with level editors where you can already do all that. And have been. For decades.
Yeah, sure.
…and nobody gives people a hard time for using level editors or game engines or any other tools that they like when trying to learn something.
This is just a new tool, it’s useful for some things and not for others.