The point being of today’s article is:

I believe every young person — roughly between ten and seventeen — should learn to vibecode. Not to become programmers, but to become conscious creators in a world where machines are learning to think.

The Situation at Hand

Last week, at a high school in Amsterdam, a student quietly opened ChatGPT on his laptop. His assignment was to write an essay about climate change. He typed a few prompts, adjusted the tone, and within minutes had a clear, fluent, well-structured piece. His teacher noticed, frowned, and said, “Redo it yourself. You can’t use AI.” The student nodded, went home, and used ChatGPT again.

He isn’t alone. Across classrooms everywhere, a quiet revolution is unfolding. Students are using AI to write, summarize, translate, and even generate code. Some teachers see it as cheating; others as the birth of a new kind of literacy. Meanwhile, outside the classroom, the world is moving faster than any curriculum.

Platforms like Lovable and Windsurf (with its built-in “Cascade” agent) now allow anyone to build software by describing what they want in plain English. A twelve-year-old in Rotterdam built a website for his football team this way. A teenager in Berlin launched a budgeting app using Windsurf prompts. What once required months of coding now happens before dinner.

And yet, many schools still punish students for using the very tools the world is already built on. The contradiction is impossible to miss: children are penalized for doing what adults now get paid to do.

The Core Dilemma

Educators want children to learn deep thinking, originality, and the ability to reason without shortcuts. Innovators, parents, and the students themselves want them to master the tools that define the modern world. Both sides have good intentions. One protects understanding, the other champions expression.

The dilemma is clear. If schools restrict AI, they risk irrelevance. If they open the gates completely, they risk losing rigor and meaning. Yet both sides want the same thing: to raise a generation that can think clearly and create freely in a world of intelligent systems.

The solution isn’t to choose between tradition and innovation, but to connect them. We don’t need to ban AI or surrender to it. We need to teach children to vibecode — to think with intelligent tools while staying fully human.

The Synthesis

Imagine a classroom where AI is not forbidden but guided. The teacher gives a challenge: “Build something useful for your school community.” Students open Lovable, describe their idea — maybe an app to track homework or to reduce food waste — and watch the first prototype appear. Then they analyze it: Why did the AI structure it this way? What could be improved? What assumptions did it make?

Suddenly, they’re not just using AI — they’re thinking about it. They’re debugging, prompting, testing, learning the logic behind creation. This is what vibecoding teaches: how to shape intelligence through curiosity, not control. How to combine creativity and reasoning. How to build something meaningful while understanding the process behind it.

Research already supports this blended approach. Studies in the Netherlands and the U.S. show that when students co-create with AI under teacher guidance, their comprehension deepens — they ask more questions, think more critically, and show more initiative. Vibecoding transforms the teacher’s role from gatekeeper to guide. From “Don’t use it” to “Show me how you used it.” From control to collaboration.

Closing Note

When I was thirteen, my teacher invited me to explore the school’s first home computer in the basement. She didn’t give instructions or warnings — she simply said, “Try it.” That moment changed everything.

If today’s children grow up seeing AI not as a threat but as a creative partner, they won’t just consume the future — they’ll compose it. Because the goal isn’t to raise coders. It’s to raise creators who understand what it means to be human in the age of intelligence.

References

* Dutch students using ChatGPT to finish homework assignments. NL Times, 2023.

* Vibe Coding in Practice: Motivations, Challenges, and Future Outlook. arXiv, 2025.

* How to Start Vibe Coding — The Software Generation Process That Is Changing How We Build. Inc.com, 2025.

* A Comprehensive Guide to Vibe Coding Tools. Medium, 2025.

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