# The Notebook and the Computer By [Hard Mode First](https://hardmodefirst.xyz) · 2026-09-02 --- How Old Were You When You Started Coding? ----------------------------------------- _“Have you seen the news?”_ I ask my husband this morning, promptly upon waking up. _“About the_ [_AI ban in NYC public schools through 8th grade_](https://www.chalkbeat.org/newyork/2026/09/02/nyc-schools-to-set-ai-policy-ban-screen-time-limits/)_?”_ _“Yeah.”_ _“I mean, isn’t that…better than we thought?”_ he says. _“Weren’t we mostly worried about high schoolers?”_ I give him a knowing look. **_How old were you when you started coding?_** * * * ### Flash back to the summer of 1999. I’m 13 years old and obsessed with a video game, _“Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego.”_ I played it every afternoon. I just loved the scheme of following a character around the world, helping her find clues to sleuth out criminals. I wanted to win every round. ![](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/9dfd78d6da559d5f26fb757d100e06bded8c8befbe980e1c492567c23bd8732d.jpg) An eerily accurate AI-generated image of what I was like in the summer of 1999 (image source: NanoBanana) At some point, I realized that while the clues changed with each level, the specific evidence you needed to obtain a warrant to arrest any criminal stayed the same each time. That’s when I came up with an idea. If I could log _all_ the details about _all_ the criminals, I could win every round. So I reached for the tool I knew best: **My notebook.** I made a page for every criminal mastermind in the game. Every time I played and learned something new about a criminal, I wrote it down in my notebook. By the end of the summer, I had a perfectly complete list of every detail about every character. I won every round. My very first database. Only I didn’t call it that, of course. I called it _writing_. * * * ### Now cut back to 1999. There’s another middle-school kid who _also_ liked to play games. His favorite was the board game, _Clue_. He’d play with his family on nights and weekends. He wanted to win every round. At some point, he realized that while the clues varied with each game play, the predictions narrowed with each player’s move. But it was tough to keep track of everything in your head. That’s when he came up with an idea. If he could log _all_ of the details about _all_ of the clues, he could beat his family to solving the mystery every time. So he reached for the tool he knew best: **His computer.** He coded the game logic into JavaScript, and logged each round of gameplay. It tracked each decision each player made, and when enough evidence was gathered, the algorithm told him the final answer using the minimum required information. He called it _coding_. In the end, my husband became an engineer, and I graduated with a journalism degree into an industry that technology had already transformed. I then spent 15 years working alongside brilliant engineers while continuing to think of myself as “non-technical.” Proximity to technology wasn’t enough. I just never saw it as something I could shape. As it turned out, that belief began forming long before high school. Yes, the risks of relational AI for children are real and unresolved. But a blanket ban doesn’t eliminate those risks. It determines which kids learn to see AI as a tool they can use to solve a problem, and which ones grow up believing it’s beyond their reach. * * * Which Tool Do You Reach For? ---------------------------- #### Yesterday, I saw what can happen when students are encouraged to reach for a different tool. In a school-wide design competition called [AI for the People](https://dinoah1981.github.io/fall-design-comp26/), 400 students at Comp Sci High (including those as young as age 14) [conceived real app concepts to solve real problems](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/bethanymarz_in-times-of-deep-technological-and-economic-ugcPost-7500672275302592512-1rWy/) for their neighborhood. One group picked up on a subtle, but important problem: _Could AI help non-English-speaking tenants turn a photo or description of a problem into a clear repair request for their landlord?_ I thought that was a very good idea. ![](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/36466152677a5b1cea70f8c6a662003deb3a3ab937c9a862061503052d723eee.jpg) I’ve been on this school’s board since it opened eight years ago. Eight years of watching 9th graders arrive already sorted into technical and non-technical. But we’ve reached the same conclusion that high school is too late to start. That’s why Comp Sci High is planning to open a middle school next year. So if high school is too late, how early is early enough? I can’t tell you exactly how early is early enough. But I can share my lived experience. I spent last year building AI education apps with my two young daughters (now ages 4 and 6) as co-shapers, not just users. My first app, [MuseKat](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/musekat/id6743862873), helped my kids make sense of the art on the walls at museums on their level, through a storytelling lens of a friendly meerkat character named _Miko_. For six months straight, my daughters trotted along to every museum in the city with me, testing Miko. We’d listen to what he told us, then they would share their feedback with me, and then I’d make a few changes. What I loved about this experience is not only that my daughters had the chance to participate in supervised use of AI, but that they saw their own feedback reflected in the resulting product. It introduced _technological agency_ at a very young age. When I introduced [Scribblins](https://scribblins.app/), a second AI-powered, play-based app later on in the year, my daughter and I showed it off together, in her public school kindergarten classroom on the Upper West Side. _“My mom made this,”_ she proudly told her friends. _“And I helped, too.”_ * * * The Cost of Starting Too Late ----------------------------- #### Since last year, I’ve helped 3,000 people build their first apps with AI no-code tools through my company, Build First. I make apps every day of the week. In the time it took me to write this blog post, I also refactored a website, applied a new design schema, and built a data layer to my training work. Last weekend, my husband found me working alone in our darkened bedroom, headphones on, illuminated by my computer screen, where I’d been hacking away on a problem alone for hours. _“Whoa,”_ he said. _“You remind me of myself in middle school.”_ I looked back at him and grimaced. I’m 39 years old. It’s taken me more than 20 years to develop that same sense of technological agency that he’s felt for most of his adult life. ![](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/6accadca38c19d621700898c9139352f04b7a8b266632b5bb60d83f3d9d40e9a.jpg) Nothing like reliving those middle school days as a grown woman (image source: NanoBanana) Today, I sometimes feel like I’m [making up for lost time](https://every.to/thesis-statements/bethany-crystal). I wonder what I would have been capable of with a little more guided instruction from a younger age. These instincts form earlier than we realize. By the time we sort children into “technical” and “nontechnical,” we may simply be naming the consequences of which tools they were encouraged to explore. If you want to see what this costs at scale, just look at corporate America. When I run AI transformations at companies, the thing standing in the way is almost never the technology. It’s capable adults who have spent entire careers believing that building software was someone else’s job. Watching that belief come apart takes only a few hours. But developing the confidence to act on it can take months. My husband absorbed that lesson naturally over a single summer. I don’t wish someone had simply taught me to code. But I wish someone had taught me that software was something I could shape. And I want every kid in this city to learn that, too. --- *Originally published on [Hard Mode First](https://hardmodefirst.xyz/the-notebook-and-the-computer)*