QUICK SIDE NOTE BEFORE I BEGIN: OpenAI is very scary, and I don't want to get a warning from the ST about political stuff, so what it is in a nutshell is that you should delete your ChatGPT account to show OpenAI that they made a really, really bad no-no. Happy April Fools. (this isn't a joke i'm serious) I got an email a few days ago saying that Scratch 4.0 is coming out. I want to hang on to 3.0 for a bit longer (yes, I know it's been 7 years since 3.0 released). Also, I want to hang on to it for as long as possible because Scratch is adding AI. The letter says, "...specifically, the tools that will let kids use AI to bring their creative ideas to life. Not the kind of AI that does the thinking for them. The kind that listens, helps them unstick, and gets out of the way..." So that means that the AI will be in charge of all of the creative stuff, right? It explicitly says that AI will not be used to do the thinking, but when you add an AI into a program, you can get carried away, and now the AI is in charge of so much more. I've tried vibe coding. It doesn't work. I stopped a long time ago. If you've been living under a cave (I would love to have been living under a cave), vibe coding is where you ask an AI to do all the coding and make your whatever. However, an AI will always find the easy way out and slack off. The code it writes never works, either. Stack Overflow is full of bad code and fixed code, and the AI got ALL the code. Bad code and all. Anyways, we should tell the ST that this isn't OK. It's not. Debugging is a lot easier on Scratch (in my opinion). I've been starting to learn python, and if Scratch 4.0 makes you stuck with vibe coding, I'm going straight to pygame. Maybe the 3.0 offline editor. I have already contacted the Scratch Team. If AI is implemented into Scratch, I quit. I am not joking. I am serious. I probably shouldn't have posted this on April Fools Day.
I got this email on Thursday, March 26th, 2026 at around 12:30 PM. The letter: "Hello I'll keep this short. My name is Kevin, and I'm the Head of Product on the Scratch Team. My team has spent the last year carefully planning for our work on Scratch 4.0 — specifically, the tools that will let kids use AI to bring their creative ideas to life. Not the kind of AI that does the thinking for them. The kind that listens, helps them unstick, and gets out of the way. This is the most ambitious thing we've ever built. And we're building it the way we build everything at Scratch: slowly, carefully, and with kids at the center of every decision. You've heard from us this week about Membership. I'm not here to give you a sales pitch — just a honest picture. We're a small, nonprofit team. And the only way we ship Scratch 4.0 is if enough families decide it matters. $50 for the year. $200 if you want to make it a Lifetime. 100% nonprofit. Support Scratch If it's not the right time, no worries at all. Your kid can keep creating on Scratch forever, no matter what. That's the whole point. Thanks for reading this far. Kevin Head of Product, Scratch" Thumbnail made by me in Canva (WITHOUT AI.) AI services listed: Gemini, ChatGPT, DeepSeek use claude or gemini or deepseek or whatever if you want to use ai, just not chatgpt
