Next year, my mom Angela Russo will be teaching rotating art classes for K–6 students.
She'll be the one wheeling a cart full of paint, pastels, and paper from classroom to classroom. The one reminding kids that mistakes are part of the process. That art doesn't need to be perfect—it just needs to be true.
But as we talked about her plans, something lit up in my brain.
What if this art class was more than a creative outlet?
What if it became a place where students learned one of the most important skills of the future—how to express intent through intelligent tools?
The kids in her classroom will grow up in a world shaped by artificial intelligence.
Not the distant, sci-fi kind. The everyday kind: smart sketchbooks, generative music tools, co-writing assistants, visual coding platforms that think with you instead of for you.
And in that world, knowing what you want to say—and being able to guide a system to say it—is the new literacy.
That's not just a technical skill. It's a human one.
It starts with creativity. With emotion. With a sense of self.
That's where the idea for Vibe-Coding as Art came from.
It's an interactive digital workbook that lets kids explore emotions, music, and visual design through AI-assisted code. But really, it's a sandbox for intent. A place where students don't just use technology—they shape it.
They begin with a feeling—let's say "lonely but hopeful." They build a custom emotion palette. They describe a scene or movement or color to the AI. And the AI helps them turn it into interactive art, sound, or animation.
No coding prerequisites. No abstract logic walls. Just a natural bridge between what I feel, what I want to create, and how I can bring it to life with machine support.
Why does this matter?
Because intent is becoming the interface.
The future won't be built by people who memorize commands. It will be built by those who can:
imagine something worth building,
describe it clearly,
collaborate with tools to realize it.
And the better you are at expressing yourself—at navigating your emotions, refining your ideas, giving form to your imagination—the better you'll be at working with intelligent systems.
That process doesn't begin in a tech lab.
It begins in places like my mom's classroom.
She'll still be teaching brushwork, color theory, and collage next year. But maybe she'll also be handing kids something bigger: The ability to understand their own voice, and to direct the tools of the future with it.
AI won't replace artists. But the next generation of artists, thinkers, and makers will need to know how to work with AI like an instrument.
Let's start tuning that instrument now—while their creativity is still loud and unfiltered. While they still believe their feelings can change things.
Because they can.
And soon, they'll know how to code that.