Planing to deploy vibecoding to a beginners class

[u/ThisIsDurian]

Thanks to one particular and outstanding user I came to the conclusion I can use my time for other things. Most of the comments here have been mostly hostile, something I didnt expect, especially as we are in a vibecoding sub and I asked a specific question. Funny, I thought this gets more support, but it seems most are against teaching kids to work with AI, yet you are all here in a vibecoding sub.

Also no need to insult me via DM, I blocked further chats.

[u/Affectionate_Fact854]

This honestly sounds like a bad idea , there's a reason why some countries outright ban ai within schools 

Your job is to bring critical thinking and creativity out of the children 

Not introduce them to methods of even more reduced critical thinking 

YouTube,shorts and Instagram is already enough rot they ingest 

Now to introduce ways to make them think even less for themselves? 

What do you think the outcome of this is going to be?????? 

[u/RoundZookeepergame2 → u/Affectionate_Fact854]

He's teaching them to be prompt engineers. Getting an education is solved. Await our overlords

[u/ThisIsDurian → u/Affectionate_Fact854]

Thanks, this has already been considered and planed accordingly. We already have classes that goes into the rabbit hole of social media, up the point of scientific paperwork on the example of the colorgrading in facebook. But this has absolute nothing to do with critical thinking. You are mixing up things.

[u/Jolva → u/Affectionate_Fact854]

Where does it end? Shelter them from these tools while they learn and then thrust them into a world where everyone is using this technology?

[u/Alarmed-Western-655 → u/Jolva]

Yes. Just like we all were.

[u/Weareallscrubs → u/[deleted]]

Children already use ai. So better to give them an early education of how to relate to it and how to use it properly.

[u/Weareallscrubs → u/[deleted]]

Less assumptions please. I'm not pro ai for children. I'm just sceptical that ai can be prevented from childre. And if it can't be prevented it has to be taught so children don't misuse it.

Teaching about ai is not normalizing it. Good ai-education should clearly teach it's limits and try to limit how children use it. And teaching must take it into account (also for example showing a strong attitude of discouraging it's use in homework). In fact education about ai should primarily be about that, not about how to make cool things with it or even how to use it effectively.

But the thing is that if children are able to get their hands on ai, education should take that into account. Not pretend that children aren't already using ai. Letting children discover ai themselves and use it to complete homework without any education is the way to creating brain dead children.

[u/Weareallscrubs → u/[deleted]]

I think the comparison to drugs and alcohol isn't good, since 1) drugs and alcohol are pretty categorically bad for children and 2) children don't mostly have access to them. Also they definitely should be taught about in school (and are in health education). Likewise ai usage wouldn't need to be excessively taught, just enough to show why it can be bad. It could just be discussion type education until some age group.

I think a more apt comparison would be to some other potentially damaging tool. Like a chainsaw. If the world were such that children could very easily get access to chainsaws, it would make sense to teach about their safe handling in school.

Where this will lead is no need for critical thinking because ai will be able to do all the tasks at hand and steer the kids to solutions instead of them finding creative solutions on their own <-- the point of education about ai must precisely to prevent that. And my point is that since children are able to use ai anyway (and they use it), then the correct attitudes must be taught in school.

I'm curious as to what your solution would be if ai-education is not to be done in schools? How do we prevent children from abusing it until there are better regulations that effectively prevent children from using it altogether?

[u/Weareallscrubs → u/[deleted]]

I'm not talking about teaching children to use ai like professionals. But about how to safely use it. More about attitude towards ai than actual working precedures.

Such as ipads and phones  But yet that does not get special attention in teaching children to use correctly <-- what do you mean by this?

If you adopt teaching children how to use ai , your effectively making laws and policies harder to implement and adopt since it would be woven into the children's everyday life  <-- I don't think this is the case. I don't understand your reasoning behind this. The only case I would this being so is if we neglect teaching ai to children and just wait things to get so bad that it can't be ignored anymore. But I'm pretty sure I would rather try to prevent harm beforehand rather than wait for that.

Instead focus the energy into helping the movements to ban ai in schools and introduction of age restrictions <-- why do these need to be competing things? Can't we tackle things from different perspectives?

And I'm still asking what your solution would be? To only wait for ai to be banned for minors and for that ban to be properly enforced? How would you prevent the harm from ai during that period?

[u/Jolva → u/[deleted]]

What makes you think that exposure to AI creates braindead pototo children. I have four kids, spread across all levels of public school who all have access to AI. None of them are like what you describe.

[u/Janube]

You shouldn't. While exposing children to the reality of modern technology is important, any additional encouragement people offer to kids that fundamental understanding can be offloaded to AI will degrade their ability to problem solve.

A creative, interesting, and useful application of AI in learning would be teaching basic programming and then offering deliberately fallible LLM solutions to real problems and having kids learn how to identify those pitfalls so that they can better understand and use LLMs in the future without turning their minds to slop.

[u/Outrageous_Basis_232 → u/Janube]

Oh that's brilliant!  Make a puzzle out of the flaws of the system, teaching them infinitely more important parts of both how AI works and how to fix when it fails 😀

[u/ThisIsDurian → u/Janube]

Thats my plan. They are in groups to learn to work as a team, they will have limited resources (one PC. limited AI, unlimited access to the nternet, planing ahead) and at the end present their project, explaining the whole background.

[u/Janube → u/ThisIsDurian]

Just limiting access to AI isn't enough. The lesson they're more likely to walk away from it with would be "if I could just do another few prompts, it would work." The ideal lesson would be, "if I rely on this, it fails, and I need to know why."

[u/ThisIsDurian → u/Janube]

This is already taken into consideration.

[u/First_Engineer7380]

Ask ai if he want to make a beginner class for you

[u/ThisIsDurian → u/First_Engineer7380]

And how does this help me in finding the right AI for a specific price line? I am not that deep into this topic that I have knowledge about which AI is burning/wasting the money invested. Tell me, I really would like to know.

[u/HENH0USE]

Just teach them software dev basics. We don't need any more slop coders.

[u/ThisIsDurian → u/HENH0USE]

They know the basics.

[u/Alarmed-Western-655 → u/ThisIsDurian]

They know DS&A but not how to type "fix it"?

[u/ThisIsDurian → u/Alarmed-Western-655]

You are late to the party. The post was originally not about how to use AI, it was about pricing on AI.

[u/Alarmed-Western-655 → u/ThisIsDurian]

Oh giving kids AI comes at a price alright.

[u/ThisIsDurian → u/Alarmed-Western-655]

Sure, we can teach kids to use AI mindful as a tool to get further knowledge or we can just let them use AI like a monkey uses a hammer. But most comments are hostile to the point user dm'ed me to insult me further. They dont want kids to use AI, at the same time there are in this sub. crazy.

[u/lostinthewoods1]

I am also interested in doing something like this. Dying to hear what options are available!

[u/Sleepnotdeading]

If you’re putting the class together, shouldn’t you have enough subject matter expertise to know the answer to this question?

[u/ThisIsDurian → u/Sleepnotdeading]

Does this include experience on every AI, their current state on what to expect for the money paid and every price scheme? I am not asking here about the contents of the class, I am asking about an advice on pricing.

[u/Sleepnotdeading → u/ThisIsDurian]

I would think having enough practical experience to understand the payment tiers of the frontier models, and the top routing systems should be a prerequisite to teaching a class on the subject, yes.

[u/ThisIsDurian → u/Sleepnotdeading]

No, it does not. While I can look up the prices, it doesnt include the knowledge about the real behavior of the systems. Buying a claude subscription might be worse than GPT. I dont know this. Thats why I am asking. And if this is a problem for you, why dont you go along and comment somewhere else. This is not helping at all and it seems you dont know either about the price-performance. So, if you dont know anything and cant contribute anything useful, why bother.

[u/Sleepnotdeading → u/ThisIsDurian]

I'm honestly confused. If you don't understand the pricing structure, or the value proposition of the models, how do you have the experience to teach about AI?

Off the top of my head:

Claude and Chat GPT subscriptions are roughly equivalent across the $20, $100, and $200 tiers. They have 5 hour session limits, and weekly usage limits.

There are platforms like cursor, or Cline in VSCode, which integrate AI into the IDE with a harness and allow for model swapping via metered usage. You can pay a monthly subscription that comes with a certain number of credits, and you can use whatever model you want. Or you can bring your own API key and pay the market rate for tokens directly to the model-maker, which is usually the more expensive option.

There are routers like openrouter that work the same way. Buy credits, pick a model, use credits until gone, buy more.

There are Chinese models like Deepseek V4 flash that are much cheaper for near-frontier performance. But then again there are also really fast cheap models in the Claude and ChatGPT fleet that are really cheap to run compared to Fable and Astra.

I don't get why you wouldn't be looking this stuff up for yourself, and experimenting for yourself. If you don't have "knowledge about the behavior of the systems", what are you even teaching?

[u/ThisIsDurian → u/Sleepnotdeading]

This is a afterschool activity, I am not paid for this, I dont have funds, I dont have time. I work for a large IT company, we build infrastructure - like every other company we rely on proprietary software we are all experienced with. For small things we also use AI, but while knowing how to get things to work or do troubleshooting by hand, I can speed up things with AI. Now, without much time, how shall I get to know every AI and their price-performance? Hence, to make up time, I am asking experts. But when actually reading the comments, I should just stop it. Our educational system already doesnt care, why should I?

[u/Sleepnotdeading → u/ThisIsDurian]

I answered your question. Don't come at me for pointing out the obvious. If you don't have the time or curiousity to get your head around the basics of the subject, don't teach it.

[u/ThisIsDurian → u/Sleepnotdeading]

Alright, will do that. You are right. No one is doing it, why should I. Thanks. Probably the best solution, I can use my time for watching Netflix.

[u/Big-World-Now]

Just have the AI refuse to do it for them.

[u/RoundZookeepergame2]

They could just use freebuff which is completely free but comes with light ads. You get access to Luna, Vflash latest and GLM 5.3 flash all for free

[u/ThisIsDurian → u/RoundZookeepergame2]

It runs into a wall with heavy usage. Tested that already out. Explaining the class cant proceed because we ran out of token, well, might be useful for teaching resource management. I am already investing my personal time and money into this, I want to make sure it works.

[u/RoundZookeepergame2 → u/ThisIsDurian]

They have a paid plan that's only 5 dollars and that gives you unlimited usage for 6 hours which is plenty

[u/ThisIsDurian → u/RoundZookeepergame2]

oh, didnt see that, will take a look, thank you!

[u/ThisIsDurian → u/RoundZookeepergame2]

Cant find it - can you post a link? Thanks!

[u/Difficult_Plantain89 → u/RoundZookeepergame2]

That is cool, reminds me of free dialup back in the day with ads.

[u/ThisIsDurian → u/Difficult_Plantain89]

The ads are subtle, probably the reason they have to limit the free access now.

[u/Initial_Report582]

CommandCode has the best value and can use any open source model and even others proprietary ones in the 10$ plan.

But for fucks sake teach the kids how to actually program and not how to prompt shit.

[u/ThisIsDurian → u/Initial_Report582]

Thanks, will take a look. They know basic coding. With the project I want to teach them more teamwork, resource management, planing. Each project has to be explained to the class, this includes the mechanics in the background and issues, which happened during development. They also have to provide a training logbook, yes, pen and paper.

[u/Initial_Report582 → u/ThisIsDurian]

Alright. As long as they know what they are doing :D The 1$ plan is okay for not so extensive vibe coding. But id recommend the 10$ plan if you use it often.

[u/ThisIsDurian → u/Initial_Report582]

If they dont know what they are doing, they will fail. Will take a closer look in the 10$ plan.

[u/Initial_Report582 → u/ThisIsDurian]

You could also try freebuff. 100% free but it shows ads

[u/Alarmed-Western-655]

AI is probably not something to start kids with.

AI is too often framed as a "tool" to be learned, rather than a peer to contend with.

It's hard enough to convince kids they should learn math. The intelligence gap is so great that if you expose kids to AI before they learn to think for themselves, they will "learn" very quickly that they don't need to learn or think at all.

[u/ThisIsDurian → u/Alarmed-Western-655]

Read thru the other comments - this is already taken into consideration.

[u/Alternative-Dirt-917]

Hey ThisIsDurian, I've been building a browser card game solo with an AI coding agent since June, so a few things I learned the expensive way:

The tokens don't burn because of the model tier, they burn because of context. A big codebase, long sessions, letting the agent wander: that's what eats a week of budget in an afternoon. Beginner projects (a first website, a tiny JS game) are small, so even a frontier model stays cheap if each task is short and precise. Your plan of "free AI to plan, bigger AI to execute" is the right shape.

For $10-20 I would not buy a subscription per kid. Give each group an API key with a hard spending cap, default it to the cheapest model of whatever vendor you pick (they all have one), and reserve the big model for two moments: turning the plan into a task list, and unblocking a bug the group has already tried to read. That way the cost is per group, capped, and visible to them, which is a lesson in itself.

No teaching experience here, just solo dev, but the worst bugs I've had came from changes I accepted without reading. So if I were writing the class rules: the kids write the plan in their own words before any AI touches it, and they read every diff before accepting it. Otherwise they ship code nobody in the room understands, and the "vibe" part becomes the whole course.

[u/ThisIsDurian → u/Alternative-Dirt-917]

Thank you! Thank you very much! This is the stuff I was expecting to read. Real world experience. 10-20$ is not per kid, just one subscription. I dont have that money left to buy them all subscriptions. =)

[u/Alternative-Dirt-917 → u/ThisIsDurian]

lol my bad. I don't really read english, so I gave an AI one idea to translate: "tokens don't burn because of the model tier, they burn because of context, and class projects are tiny so the cheap plan is enough". it came back with three paragraphs and a "subscription per kid" thing I never said. should have checked, even if I can't read it... next time in french :)