Kids Aren't Just Using AI Anymore — They're Building With It

A new generation of kid creators is emerging. Here's what that means, why it matters, and what we built for them.

An 11-year-old asks Google Gemini to build her a multiplication game. She doesn't know how to code. She doesn't need to. Twenty minutes later, she has a working app.

Her dad — a veteran tech community builder — watches it happen and says: "She wasn't weighed down with the idea that she couldn't do it. She just assumed she could — and she did."

That moment is happening in living rooms, bedrooms, and kitchens all over the country right now. And it's changing what it means to be a kid who grows up with AI.

The shift from consumer to creator

For the past few years, the conversation about kids and AI has been almost entirely about consumption — what kids are using, what they're being exposed to, what risks come with handing a child a general-purpose chatbot and hoping for the best.

That conversation is still important. But something else is happening alongside it, and it's getting less attention: kids are building.

In 2026, "vibe coding" — describing what you want to build in plain language and letting AI generate the code — has gone from a developer trend to a mainstream on-ramp for anyone with an idea and curiosity. A 13-year-old used Replit Agent to build a full 3D game with no prior coding experience. Kids are creating apps, games, stories, and tools that actually work — not as school projects, but because they wanted to make something.

Alexandr Wang, the world's youngest self-made billionaire and now leading Meta's AI lab, put it bluntly: "The next Bill Gates is probably a 13-year-old who's vibe coding right now."

He's not wrong. And more importantly for parents: this isn't a distant future. It's happening right now, in your house, with or without a platform designed to support it.

Why this matters more than it sounds

The instinct when we talk about kids and AI is to focus on the risks — and those risks are real. But there's a different kind of risk that gets less attention: the risk of treating children only as consumers of AI rather than potential creators with it.

The research is increasingly clear that the learning benefits of AI tools compound over time. Students who start developing AI fluency early — who learn to prompt, iterate, evaluate, and build — gain skills that transfer broadly. Not just technical skills. Creative confidence. Problem-solving instincts. The understanding that if you have an idea, you can try to make it real.

The question isn't whether your child will grow up in a world shaped by AI. That's already decided. The question is whether they grow up as someone who uses AI tools without understanding them, or as someone who can actually build with them.

Those are different futures.

But building needs a safe place to land

Here's the problem. The tools where vibe coding is most accessible — Replit, Cursor, Lovable, Bolt — were built for adult developers. They're powerful. They're also completely undesigned for children. No safety layer. No age-appropriate guardrails. No parent visibility. No place for a kid to share what they built with an audience that makes sense.

A kid who builds a math game with AI and wants to share it with other kids shouldn't have to navigate GitHub or figure out how to deploy to a URL. They shouldn't have to post it somewhere unmoderated and hope for the best.

They should have a place for it.

That's what we built.

Introducing the HeyOtto Marketplace: The App Store Where Kids Are the Creators

Build it. Share it. Own it.

Starting today, the HeyOtto Marketplace is live — a community-powered library of apps, storybooks, games, and learning tools where kids aren't just the audience. They're the creators.

Here's how it works:

A child builds something with Otto — a storybook about a dragon who's afraid of fire, a quiz about their favorite topic, a comic strip, a math game that's actually fun to play. They submit it through the Creator Portal. Our team reviews it for safety, age-appropriateness, and quality. If it passes, it goes live in the Marketplace — discoverable by every family on HeyOtto.

Their name goes on it. Their work reaches other kids. That's what building with AI should feel like.

The Marketplace launches with vetted resources across ages 8–18, spanning interactive apps, illustrated storybooks, learning tools, creative resources, and subject-specific collections. Every resource passes human review. Every resource is included with every HeyOtto subscription — no extra fees.

Learn more about the HeyOtto Marketplace and read the full launch guide in our Marketplace resource.

The creator connection: vibe coding meets child safety

What makes the Marketplace different from just "a library of kids' content" is the creation layer underneath it.

HeyOtto's tools — image generation, storybook builder, comic strip creator, code sandbox, document creation, web search — are the same building blocks that power vibe coding, packaged inside a COPPA-compliant environment with age-appropriate guardrails and parent controls already built in. A 9-year-old and a 16-year-old are working with different constraints, different creative scaffolding, different levels of complexity. That's by design.

The result is something that doesn't exist anywhere else: a place where kids can go from idea → build → publish → share in a single environment, with their parents informed and in control the whole time.

No GitHub. No unmoderated comment sections. No adult content one wrong search away. Just a kid, an idea, and a platform that was actually built for them.

Explore Meet Otto tools, the parent dashboard, and our safety approach.

Coming soon: The HeyOtto Creator Program

The Marketplace is our foundation. What we're building on top of it is bigger.

The HeyOtto Creator Program — launching later this year — is for the educators, parents, and kid creators who want to do more than submit a single resource. It's for the ones who want to build a catalog, grow an audience, and be recognized for what they create.

Here's what's coming:

• Creator profiles. Every approved creator gets a dedicated page with their full resource catalog, bio, and community stats. Your child's name on their work, permanently.
• Classroom collections. Teachers will be able to build and share curriculum-aligned bundles, shareable with parent approval. The Marketplace becomes a tool for schools, not just families.
• Personalized recommendations. Otto gets smarter about what each child will love — surfacing resources based on their interests, age, and learning history.
• More languages. Spanish, Mandarin, French, and more, with culturally responsive content from creators around the world.

If you're an educator, a parent creator, or a kid who's been building things with Otto and wondering where they go — the Creator Program is for you.

What this generation already knows

There's something worth sitting with in the story of the 11-year-old and the multiplication game.

She didn't ask permission. She didn't wait for a class. She didn't worry about whether she was "technical enough." She had a problem — learning multiplication was boring — and she assumed she could build a solution. And she did.

That instinct — the assumption that you can make something if you try — is one of the most valuable things a child can develop. AI is making it accessible to kids who would have been locked out before. Not just kids with coding backgrounds or tech-forward schools or parents who work in software. Any kid with an idea and a platform that meets them where they are.

That's what we're building toward. Not kids who are fluent in prompts as a party trick, but kids who grow up believing that if they can imagine something, they have a real shot at making it exist.

The Marketplace is the first step. The Creator Program is the next one.

We can't wait to see what they build.