Handing on the Reins

A fifteen-year-old on work experience took the reins of my children's-book-turned-game last week and swam it further in five days than I expected. This is his story, and mine.

The book is called The Worker. I wrote it mostly for fun. I love children's books. They are honest about big things by pretending to be small.

Its main character is a small fish called Wren who spends her days in a murky grey bay, sorting rubbish. Her friend Sal sorts beside her. Wren is good at sorting. But she keeps looking up past the grey water and seeing a sliver of clear blue. She sets out on adventures to save the reef. On the last spread she is back in the Grey Bay, sitting beside Sal with the statement:

"The work was the same. But now, she knew what it was for."

Living Vicariously In My School

My brain started itching. Thoughts started to float to the surface. What could be better than a children's book? Why, a game of course. I already had Claude and had been using it to vibe-code my TypeScript website, so why not a game.

It started small. Geometric shapes swimming in a vector sea, and rapidly evolved from there. It is amazing what you can do when there is more than one of you! Suddenly I was using Suno for background music, elevenlabs for sound effects and Gemini's Nano Banana Pro to generate sprites (that I had to edit.) All of this for a VERY modest cost.

I was somewhere in Level 6 when a work friend of a friend asked if their fifteen-year-old could do his school placement week with me. The placement was arranged through his school's usual work-experience programme, with his parents on the loop from the outset. For the sake of data governance we will call him Bobby. Bobby loves music, develops his own games, and is very new to what the industry has been calling vibe coding.

I said yes without needing to think about it. I like teenagers, and I liked the shape of what we might do together.

The brief

I had already spent a "huge amount" (20 minutes) of time with Claude planning and designing what we would do next on level 6, so it was easy to get Claude to look at the code, our design spec and the tooling we used and for Claude to produce a brief that both Bobby and Unifrog could use.

This would have normally been impossible in a busy week.

The week

The week wasn't smooth. On the Tuesday morning Microsoft Co-Pilot had burned through all his credits. Gemini Antigravity would not let him log in because of an under-eighteen age gate on Google's side. I had a conversation with his mum about a monthly subscription on the family account with auto-renewal turned off. We figured it out together. That is not the kind of friction anyone plans for. It is the kind you have to push through on.

By Wednesday Bobby had a working Level 6. Four fish schools forming a bulldozer-shaped fan in front of Wren. A four-stage logic: watchers detects, glowers lights, sorters clears, scribblers sweeps. The mechanic that is the level.

He also rejected some of the AI's suggestions along the way. When the tools offered a smooth interpolation for the school-formation transitions, he said no. The smoothness was visually confusing in play, and he asked for something more discrete. When he found himself repeatedly prompting the AI to debug the same class of issue, he named the problem out loud: "I want to reduce the ineffective prompts and understand the root issues." And then he did; he shifted approach mid-week and started getting into more of the detail.

That is not what I expected from a fifteen-year-old on day three.

Wren's next steps

On Level 7, the "Secret" bonus level, Bobby had been given full editorial rights, with me available to bounce ideas off, and he produced a brilliant output. I won't spoil it for you other than to say you need to play the game as if you were really hungry.

The closing text, the one that stays on screen after the level completes, we shaped together on the Friday morning:

In a world where work is constant, remember who you are.

Jointly phrased by bouncing ideas back and forth, a line neither of us would have arrived at alone. He put it in the game.

I want to say I found it surprising. Honestly what I felt was a quiet kind of gratitude. A young man had been handed a brush and used it to illustrate something worth seeing.

On the Friday afternoon Bobby's mum joined us on the call. He walked her through the game he had built, level by level, ending on the fish tank he had turned into something more than a puzzle. And then we pushed the code to the live site together.

Wren has next steps because Bobby took her there. Not because I sent him with instructions.

What's in it for me

Honestly, this was part experiment, part exploration and part education. I never knew how capable Bobby was, I did not know how long it would take him to adapt, and I did not know what I would personally discover.

I was amazed. There was discomfort at loss of code control, but I saw that rapidly shift across to taking creative and cognitive responsibility for the outputs of the AI coding. Adaptation to the technology in one day, autonomy within the first day. The only limits were the ones related to token costs..... yes what a pain.

Let me phrase that clearly. A 15 year old took ownership of vibe coding tools and built 2 working levels in one week!

While my generation can teach the next one about the tools, the challenge we should rise to is giving space for them to find their voice and being present for the moments when they choose what to do with what they have.

Wren has always been about that choice. Grey Bay and blue ocean. Sorting because you must, or sorting because you know what it is for.

Thanks "Bobby" for being part of The Collective's journey and telling the missing part of Wren's story.

I keep coming back to the same question these days, so I will end on it.

Who are you sorting for?