should beginners use an AI coding assistant?
· a working compromise for kids learning to code in 2026 — no AI for the first weeks, then AI as a colleague, never as a parent.
i’m not sure yet. i have a 5th/6th grade class learning to code, my own kids at home, and a paid-for chat-ai sitting one tab over. the question keeps coming up: do i let the kids use it?
on one side: an ai assistant collapses the gap between “i have an idea” and “i have something that runs.” for a beginner who’d otherwise drown in syntax, that’s huge. it’s an infinite-patience tutor. it never sighs.
on the other side: a beginner doesn’t yet know which questions are good ones. they get answers they can’t read, and they paste the answers back without understanding. they look productive while learning nothing. they also miss the part of programming that, in my experience, is the skill: getting comfortable being stuck.
my working compromise, today:
- for the first 6–8 weeks, no ai. they need to feel the texture of a real error message. they need to know what “stuck” feels like before they outsource the un-sticking.
- after that, ai is allowed, but it’s a colleague, not a parent. you have to be able to say what you asked it, what it answered, and whether you agreed.
- never paste code you can’t explain line by line. if you paste it, you own it. if you own it, you read it.
this is not a final answer. i’ll probably revise it as the term goes on. the worst version is the one where ai becomes a way to look like you’re learning without learning. the best version, i think, is the one where it removes the cliffs that used to lose kids forever — the syntax wall, the install wall, the first-bug wall — and leaves the real climb.