Why Kids Should Start with AI Instead of Grinding Through Code

There are children who go to a computer school once a week to learn programming. A few years ago, the sight of them typing code at a screen would have looked, without question, like a head start on the future.

That learning is not wasted, even now. What has quietly changed over the past few years is the size of the harvest — how much ability actually comes back for the hours a child puts in.

The era of humans writing code by hand is over

In April 2025, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed that 20 to 30 percent of the code in the company's internal repositories is already written by AI. Around the same time, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that more than 30 percent of Google's new code is AI-generated. In Stack Overflow's 2025 survey of roughly 49,000 developers, 84 percent said they use or plan to use AI tools in their work. In the professional world, the task of "memorizing syntax and typing it fast and accurately" has shifted to AI within just two or three years. Understanding the fundamentals still matters as a foundation — but the leading role in the act of writing code no longer belongs to humans.

The path is not wrong — it has become a detour

The same survey holds other numbers as well. Sixty-six percent of developers named "AI answers that are almost right, but not quite" as their top frustration, and 45 percent said fixing AI-written code takes up their time. Human work has moved from writing code to deciding what to build, doubting the AI's output, and making it correct itself. Yet what many programming classes spend the most time on is memorizing syntax and copying model code — precisely the part AI took over first. Walking that path for several years will still get a child to the destination. By the time they arrive, however, the market value of hand-coding will have fallen. Measured by the return on the hours invested, it is becoming quite a detour.

Children will not wait for the order adults decided on

Meanwhile, children have already started using AI. In a November 2025 survey by NTT Docomo's Mobile Society Research Institute, covering 1,200 pairs of elementary and junior high school students and their parents across Japan, more than 40 percent of junior high students said they use generative AI — roughly triple the figure from a year earlier. The real question is not whether they use it, but how. Will they learn it as a tool for copying homework answers, or as a partner for turning what they want to make into something real? While adults enforce the rule of "AI only after the programming basics are done," children are mastering only the copy-the-answer kind of use. The ones falling behind are not the children — they are the adults clinging to the old way of learning.

There is no need to quit the programming lessons a child is already taking. Learning the fundamentals still has meaning. But it is a foundation for reading, doubting, and correcting AI's output — not for becoming a craftsman who keeps writing code by hand. Instead of years of grammar before a first project, a child builds something with AI on day one, and looks inside the code for the first time when it does not behave as intended. The ability to read code, break problems apart, and give AI precise instructions is needed — and learned — in exactly that process, and the same hours return far more. Neither elementary schoolers nor teenagers need a preparation period to join the "builder" side of AI.

This is why Digital Kodomo BASE's free classes in Ota City, Tokyo, have children build games together with generative AI from their very first day.