Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

https://read.technically.dev/p/vibe-coding-and-the-maker-movement

405 426 5 months ago

read.technically.dev

The author of this article gives a more balanced POV than mine. I think most (maybe overwhelming majority) of publicized vibe coding projects are complete technical virtue signaling.

GrinningFool• 5 months ago

I think it's often genuine excitement to share a thing - without quite processing that anybody with the same idea can now build it (for simple- to mid-complexity projects).

piker• 5 months ago

This is the part I don't understand. It's like sharing a finger painting half the time. Yes, cool, but so what?

[Edit: no need for the downvote, folks, it was an honest question although it seemed otherwise. I think the answers below make sense.]

wasmainiac• 5 months ago

I also think it is often momentum from “do you have a GitHub” questions you see in hiring.

There are many people who code to make cool stuff and enjoy sharing, but there is even more people who code to look good on CV.

I’m not trying to be mean, this is just an anecdote I had from my time hiring.

epiccoleman2• 5 months ago

KG: Anybody coulda wrote it, anybody coulda done that, one song, just one note

JB: Yeah but guess who did write it, me!

KG: Yeah but did you write this?

JB: Dude, I did, I told you to do the bendy every once in a while!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLvOLjHt4S0

lanfeust6• 5 months ago

Even if status-signaling through this vector loses it's lustre, AI slop (agentic or otherwise) will not, and some of that slop will take on the guise of "vibe-coding" projects.

LastTrain3• 5 months ago

I’m no fan of vibe coding but I usually find that people who use the term virtue signaling have none and hate those that do.

Apocryphon2• 5 months ago

Not to mention they're probably thinking of motivations more along the lines of "brand-burnishing."

jajuuka5• 5 months ago

Vice signaling.

AntiDyatlov• 5 months ago

It's not virtous to make a show of one's virtue, virtue signaling is a baplutely a real thing, and a defect.

Petersipoi• 5 months ago

I hope the irony of your comment isn't lost on you

whazor• 5 months ago

With agentic loops, you specify what you want and it continues to do stuff until ‘it works’. Then publish. Its takes less time and attention. So projects are less thought out and less tested as well.

In the end, I think it’s not about how a project was created. But how much passion and dedication went into it. It’s just that the bar got lowered.

cestith• 5 months ago

Every market on some level can be analogized to a common and simple market.

One of the common examples in management books is the signage industry. You can have custom logos custom molded, extruded, embossed, carved, or at least printed onto a large, professional-looking billboard or marquee size sign. You can have a video billboard. You can have a vacuum formed plastic sign rotating on top of a pole. At the end of the day, though, your barrier to entry is a teenager with a piece of posterboard and some felt-tipped markers.

What has happened is that as the coding part has become easier, the barrier to entry has lowered. There are still parts of the market for the bespoke code running in as little memory and as few CPU cycles as possible, with the QA needed for life-critical reliability. There’s business-critical code. There’s code reliable enough for amusement. But the bottom of the market keeps moving lower. As that happens, people with less skill and less dedication can make something temporary or utilitarian, but it’s not going to compete where people have the budget to do it the higher-quality way.

How much an LLM or any other sort of agent helps at the higher ends of the market is the only open question. The bottom of the market will almost certainly be coded with very little skilled human input.

htlark• 5 months ago

These promotional articles get more refined: They start with the negatives and then refute them in the last paragraphs.

None of these sophisticated articles mention that you could already steal open source with the press of a button before LLMs. The theft has just been automated with what vibe coders think is plausible deniability.

AnimalMuppet• 5 months ago

"Laundering". It's running the source through an LLM to escape the license.

aforwardslash6• 5 months ago

TL;DR

Quick answer: No. Long answer: its the opposite; as an example, can use claude code to generate, build and debug ESP32 code for a given purpose; suddenly everyone can build smart gizmos without having to learn c/c++ and having knowledge of a ton of libraries.

tylerflick• 5 months ago

Not sure I see it like that. Micropython removes most of the rough edges of doing embedded C. If you prefer no code then I suggest ESPHome for your ESP IoT projects.

aforwardslash6• 5 months ago

The other day I built a quick PoC to control 1024 rgb leds using RMT (esp32) and a custom protocol I was developing. Im pretty sure micropython would suck for that.

The other day I also developed a RGB-RGBW converter using a rp2040; claude did most of the assembly, so instead of taking a couple of days, it took a couple of hours.

I don't prefer no code; my point is software is a barrier on embedded systems, and if I - someone who can actually program in c/c++, python and assembly, see huge benefits in using LLMs, for someone at an entry level it is a life changer.

roxolotl• 5 months ago

I think the reality is that the maker movement slowed down not because it’s hard to learn c++ but because people don’t care enough. Will maybe twice as many people participate now? Sure. But that’ll still be a small fraction of people.

aforwardslash6• 5 months ago

I don't think it has slowed down; in fact,I think it has grown in the last few years. Sure, it is a niche - and will probably always be - but one never had such a low barrier of entry to build stuff and be creative; you have plenty of very powerful chips, somewhat usable SDKs, a ton of COTS ready to use components ranging from gps sensors to rotary encoders, and you can design your own pcbs and order them cheap from China; you can also design enclosures and 3d print parts in your own home with precision that was only accessible to specialized companies 15 years ago. LLMs are a great help not only on the code generation part, but also on the design part - as an example, I sometimes use ChatGPT to generate openscad functions, and it isn't half-bad.

g947o2• 5 months ago

For what purpose exactly?

I have Arduino and raspberry Pi boards. I am perfectly capable of hand writing code that runs on these machines. But they are sitting in the drawer gathering dust, because I don't have a use case -- everything I could possibly do with them is either not actually useful on a daily basis, or there are much better & reliable solutions for the actual issue. I literally spent hours going through other people's projects (most of which are very trivial), and decided that I have better things to do with my time. Lots and lots of people have the same issue.

And Claude Code is not going to change a single bit of that.

aforwardslash6• 5 months ago

So, because you don't see value in it, you assume its the same for everyone. Got it.

Also, its not about if there are better or more reliable options; that's the opposite of the maker mentality - you do it because it is useful, it is fun or just because you enjoy doing it.

Such as designing some light fixture, printing it, and illuminating it with an esp32 and some ws2812 leds. Yah you could spend an afternoon coding color transitions. Or use claude code for that.

fhub• 5 months ago

The “maker movement” isn’t dead and it wasn’t born recently either. People have been DIYing for all sorts of reasons for very long time.

Mars0082• 5 months ago

If anything it was just boosted with introduction of cheap 3d printers.

busterarm• 5 months ago

And recent rapid improvement in the technology its availability...

throwway120385• 5 months ago

What's new is this concept of the "maker movement" as a distinct counterculture. It's relatively easy to go buy parts and materials and make things. People 30 or 40 years ago who built stuff instead of buying it didn't really identify as anything because that was just what you did when you wanted something. Whereas nowadays you can buy pretty much anything on Amazon, even things that are fit for a very specific purpose.

For example, if you wanted a pretty dress with a specific fabric and cut, you would likely have had to sew it yourself or pay a tailor because your off-the-rack options would be limited, costly, or ill-fitting. But people just did that without fanfare and it wasn't a counterculture. Or if you wanted custom cabinets or resin-coated live-edge stair treads, etc. You'd just figure out how to make it if you wanted it. Or you could pay someone else to do it.

dd8601fn2• 5 months ago

I think the severity of this is wildly overblown in an effort to make it fit the thesis.

Like… if the maker thing was less of an insane cult that died out than genuine excitement about things that actually did matter… well the whole thing falls apart.

We’re just not required to accept the (false, I think) premise this depends on, even if we’re inclined to agree with what it says about vibecoding.

KaiserPro3• 5 months ago

The maker movement is still there, its just make magazine died a death.

What has changed is that the fusion of the more artistic end of model making and woodwork is less lumped together with electronics and 3d printing.

I would say that there are much more makers, but they are more specialised.

WillAdams• 5 months ago

Yeah, I've always characterized "Maker" as "Geek who missed shop class".

Curious how this differed in northern Europe where Sloyd Woodworking has a long tradition in early education:

https://rainfordrestorations.com/category/woodworking-techni...

amelius• 5 months ago

Yeah but now vibe coding will make DIY-ers look like a bunch of luddites.

And mastering a technology has lost its point.

nickthegreek• 5 months ago

Plenty of people fall in both camps of DIY and vibe coding. Just last week I used codex to write me so great scad file so that I now have a token generator for my multi color 3d printer. Vibe Coding can allow makers to go further quicker.

dylan604• 5 months ago

For people that have been doing something for some time, it's kind of funny when their old thing becomes new. Old things are now suddenly becoming internet famous and starts trending, so it suddenly becomes "new". Eventually, those new comers that only came along as trend followers fall away. That leaves the OG people plus some of the new comers that will stick around. Eventually, a new generation will discover it and it becomes "new" in whatever circles they run.

lm284692• 5 months ago

If you see it through a cynical capitalist lens you could argue the maker movement is just an engineered market segment, how many people bought raspberry pis, arduino, 3d printers and barely use them? Do they actually make things or do they watch videos of influencers making things and selling them the dream (and tools)

MattGrommes• 5 months ago

Yeah, I have no idea what this guy is talking about. I still get Make magazine full of people making projects every month. My youtube feed is similarly full of people making stuff and sharing it with the community.

Check out the Maker Project Lab weekly video showcasing awesome stuff from the maker community, it's inspiring and fun to see. https://www.youtube.com/@MakerProjectLab

Apocryphon2• 5 months ago

The hype cycle of 3D printers has probably plateaued into productivity now. Certainly the Maker movement is alive and well but it's not the hot new thing like it was a decade or a dozen years ago. Makerspaces aren't sprouting like mushrooms like they were before (partly because critical mass was already reached, partly because the pandemic reduction of physicality I'd guess), you don't see gimmicky 3D-printing kiosks at the mall anymore.

jajuuka5• 5 months ago

I feel like the "maker movement" was more a corporate effort to commoditize tools and supplies to sell to makers. Not to mention selling the lifestyle of "maker".

9rx• 5 months ago

Making isn't dead, but the movement is. There is no longer a large gap of people who are gaining interested in it but who haven't yet figured out how to get started. Now, everyone who wants to make it is already doing it.

franciscator• 5 months ago

If you're vibecoding the start of the singularity... then may be yes.

saberience• 5 months ago

My general take on most vibe coding projects ("Hey, look, I built this over the weekend"), is general dismissiveness. Mostly because of the effort required, i.e. why should I care about something that someone did with almost zero effort, a few prompts?

If someone tells me they ran a marathon, I'm impressed because I know that took work. If someone tells me they jogged 100 meters, I don't care at all (unless they were previously crippled or morbidly obese etc.).

I think there are just a ton of none-engineers who are super hyped right now that they built something/anything, but don't have any internal benchmark or calibration about what is actually "good" or "impressive" when it comes to software, since they never built anything before, with AI or otherwise.

Even roughly a year ago, I made a 3D shooting game over an evening using Claude and never bothered sharing it because it seemed like pure slop and far too easy to brag about. Now my bar for being "impressed" by software is incredibly high, knowing you can few shot almost anything imaginable in a few hours.

tayo42• 5 months ago

Do people build to impress with an implementation that no one cares about really? Or to share the end product?

I think now you are freed up to make a shooter that people will actually want to play. Or at least attempt it.

We probably need to come to terms with the idea that no one cares about those details. Really, 2 years ago no one would have cared about your hand crafted 3d shooter either I think.

movedx01• 5 months ago

It doesn't matter, neither of those scenarios makes the effort impressive in this case. The vibe coded thing might even be useful - that does not make it impressive though. Effort does.

the_af9• 5 months ago

I think now you are freed up to make a shooter that people will actually want to play. Or at least attempt it.

Taking this to an extreme, let's say vibe coding becomes real enough, and frictionless enough, that you can prompt a first person shooter into existence in a few minutes or hours.

If/when this becomes true, nobody will want to play your shooter. You'll share your shooter with people and if they care at all about shooters, they'll just go prompt their favorite AI tool and conjure their own into existence.

Admittedly this is a bit extreme, and we aren't there yet. But I've thought about this in relation to art, and how some people now go "well, this empowers people who didn't know how to make a movie/cartoon/painting/game, it's empowering and democratizing". But in my mind, art is a form of communication between humans. Without the exchange between humans, art cannot exist. If all of us are each lost in our own AI-powered projects, and if anything can be easily conjured out of thin air, then why bother with the next person's art project (game or whatever)? I don't care about your game, let me make my own in a few minutes.

I'm thinking about potential counterpoints: ah, yes, but it's about "ideas". While we can both make our ideas reality, my ideas are more inventive, so my AI-powered projects are more appealing. I'm not convinced about this; I think slop will dominate and invade public spaces, but also... why draw the line at ideas? Why is "skill with a pencil" replaceable with AI-slop, but ideas aren't? Ideas are often overrated, what matters is execution, anyway.

JaggerJo• 5 months ago

Yeah - It feels similar to me.

Why share something that anyone can just “prompt into existence”?

Architecture wise and also just from a code quality perspective I have yet to encounter AI generated code that passes my quality bar.

Vibe coding is great for a PoC but we usually do a full rewrite until it’s production ready.

————

Might be a hot take, but I don’t think people who can’t code should ship or publish code. They should learn to do it and AI can be a resource on the way.. but you should understand the code you “produce”. In the end it’s yours, not the AIs code.

dnautics• 5 months ago

Architecture wise and also just from a code quality perspective I have yet to encounter AI generated code that passes my quality bar.

You should consider trying to using AI in a programming language that scores high in the AutoCoderBenchmark.

gumby271• 5 months ago

I struggle with this feeling as well, a huge part of the Maker movement was excitement around people building and importantly learning how to build thing. Iterating and improving each time is a pretty common thread you'll see throughout the community. It's hard to have someone show you a thing they generated instead of made and to feel the same way. Yes, they played a part in that thing existing, and part of that person is reflected in the output, but I don't think most Makers would say the final output is goal, so what's there to be excited about?

It's hard to not be dismissive or gate-keeping with this stuff, my goal isn't to discourage anyone or to fight against the lower barriers to entry, but it's simply a different thing when someone prompts a private AI model to make a thing in an hour.

danesparza• 5 months ago

Wait - the maker movement ended?

redwood• 5 months ago

A mix of perspectives in here that feel inter-related. The maker movement state-side leaned more "fun or artsy" while the real maker movement you could argue was thriving in China. Another darker way of looking at it is: if the maker movement was really believed to be a way to bring manufacturing back, it was effectively cargo-culting that by focusing only on a narrow set of building blocks. Maybe it's similar to building your own PC from parts at Fry's back at the day: that felt good... and you did feel you were really making something. But you were really doing final assembly and abstracting out the complexity of building those building blocks that went into it.

Anyway I think we are seeing a scenius phase -- it's just happening everywhere all at once on a world stage. And it's exciting. As with any moment in time there's a ton of experimentation and a small number of break-out hits. Also the pace of change means there's less staying power for a break-out hit than there used to be.

But the quick break-out hit phenomenon is particularly applicable for things that are more about the attention economy and less about the boring hidden things that traditionally have been where the economy's silent toil is really centered.

All of this makes me feel the author is too close to the creative end-consumer layer e.g. "make something flashy and cool whether it's a 3d-printer in a 5th avenue dept. store window, or a new app front end" but perhaps less focused on the full depth of things that really exist around them.

This really resonates with me in that a lot of NYC's "tech" circa 2013 was 3d printing oriented, much more so than in Silicon Valley. And I wondered why? but then it was a reflection that tech in NYC then was more about marketing, story telling, and less about the depth...

Obviously you had the west coast makers, you had the burners, so I don't mean to conflate all these differnet things. But the idea that Maker Faires were really about bringing manufacturing back... I don't know I think it was more about the counterculture, about having fun. I think that's coming back to tech right now as well in a sense. Even if it's also got dystopian overtones

sachben91• 5 months ago

Appreciate this re: maker movement perhaps being too aesthetically oriented and hence missing out on perhaps the real scenius

axegon_• 5 months ago

The maker movement is not dead but it's a far more niche audience. Don't get me wrong, get a 3d printer and an arduino(or arduino like equivalent), endure a week of suffering and you are hooked for life: this was my own experience and anyone that I know that has ever gone down that road. ~~vibe~~ Slop coding won't die either but there are a lot of people will get a cold shower sooner or later: some already have. All ai slop is a russian roulette where the players may not even know they are playing and the gun is a backwards revolver. I can't say whether slop coding will professionally die before or after the burst of the AI bubble, but everyone is starting to realize that slop is unmaintainable, inefficient and full of bugs when you factor in all the edge cases no slop machine will ever cover. AI can exist in non-professional spaces and hobby projects, though I'd argue it may be equally as dangerous for the people that use it and those around them: you are only one firewall-cmd away from leaking all your personal data.

As for the parallels with the maker movements, here's one example: drones are one of my hobbies. I love drones and I've built countless fpv ones. For anyone that hasn't done that, the main thing to know is that no two self-build drones are the same - custom 3d printed parts, tweaks, tons of fiddling about. The main difference is that while I am self-taught when it comes to drones, I have some decent knowledge in physics, I understand the implications of building a drone and what could go wrong: you won't see me flying any of my drones in the city - you may find me in some remote, secluded area, sure. The point is I am taking precautions to make sure that when I eventually crash my drone(not IF but WHEN), it will be in a tree 10km from anything that breathes. Slop code is something you live with and there are infinite ways to f-up. And way too many people are living in denial.

simonw• 5 months ago

The title of the linked article is "Vibe Coding and the Maker Movement" but the title on Hacker News is "Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?" - I think the original title should be restored.

itunpredictable2• 5 months ago

updated the title of the linked article instead :)

a1o• 5 months ago

I have a feeling that the maker movement specific being talked here was with meetups for showcasing things (fairs?) and with local hackerspaces at the age of the makerbot as the “game changer” 3D printer. If that is the case that one was captured by corporations - and for makerbot, the Stratasys “takeover”. I guess the AI/vibe coding was born from corporations but with local models there is this promise to move it to easier/more open access. I feel it’s too soon to tell to trace part of the parallels. I also feel the Maker movement cited was at a better age for Blogs, so lots of the vibe coding may just be happening without an audience.

windex• 5 months ago

Far more people are coding and participating and creating things now than before. Doesn't matter what you call it. There is enough excitement.

rglover2• 5 months ago

When you spend two years making useless Arduino projects, you develop instincts about electronics, materials, and design that you can’t get from a tutorial. When vibe coding goes straight to production, you lose that developmental space. The tool is powerful enough to produce real output before the person using it has developed real judgment.

The crux of the problem. The only way to truly know is to get your hands dirty. There are no shortcuts, only future liabilities.

bool3max• 5 months ago

You're absolutely right -- that's the crux of the problem. There are no shortcuts, only future liabilities.

james2doyle• 5 months ago

You're absolutely right

Bot detected

Aurornis2• 5 months ago

If you didn't catch it, this is a joke calling out the comment above it for using a couple obvious LLM-isms. The comment above may have been a joke, too. It's hard to tell any more.

alwa• 5 months ago

Then again, sophisticated manufactured electronics had long been cheap and available by the time somebody thought to create Arduino as a platform in the first place.

And even today, people hack on assembly and ancient mainframe languages and demoscene demos and Atari ROMs and the like (mainly for fun but sometimes with the explicit intention of developing that flavor of judgment).

I predict with high confidence that not even Claude will stop tinkerers from tinkering.

All of our technical wizardry will become anachronistic eventually. Here I stand, Ozymandius, king of motorcycle repair, 16-bit assembly, and radio antennae bent by hand…

epiccoleman2• 5 months ago

I might be tilting at a strawman of your definition of vibe coding - apologies in advance if so.

But LLM-aided development is helping me get my hands dirty.

Last weekend, I encountered a bug in my Minecraft server. I run a small modded server for my kids and I to play on, and a contraption I was designing was doing something odd.

I pulled down the mod's codebase, the fabric-api codebase (one of the big modding APIs), and within an hour or so, I had diagnosed the bug and fixed it. Claude was essential in making this possible. Could I have potentially found the bug myself and fixed it? Almost certainly. Would I have bothered? Of course not. I'd have stuck a hopper between the mod block and the chest and just hacked it, and kept playing.

But, in the process of making this fix, and submitting the PR to fabric, I learned things that might make the next diagnosis or tweak that much easier.

Of course it took human judgment to find the bug, characterize it, test it in-game. And look! My first commit (basically fully written by Claude) took the wrong approach! [1]

Through the review process I learned that calling `toStack` wasn't the right approach, and that we should just add a `getMaxStackSize` to `ItemVariantImpl`. I got to read more of the codebase, I took the feedback on board, made a better commit (again, with Claude), and got the PR approved. [2]

They just merged the commit yesterday. Code that I wrote (or asked to have written, if we want to be picky) will end up on thousands of machines. Users will not encounter this issue. The Fabric team got a free bugfix. I learned things.

Now, again - is this a strawman of your point? Probably a little. It's not "vibe coding going straight to production." Review and discernment intervened to polish the commit, expertise of the Fabric devs was needed. Sending the original commit straight to "production" would have been less than ideal. (arguably better than leaving the bug unfixed, though!)

But having an LLM help doesn't have to mean that less understanding and instinct is built up. For this case, and for many other small things I've done, it just removed friction and schlep work that would otherwise have kept me from doing something useful.

This is, in my opinion, a very good thing!

[1] https://github.com/FabricMC/fabric-api/pull/5220/changes/3e3...

[2] https://github.com/FabricMC/fabric-api/pull/5220/changes

gowld2• 5 months ago

Couldn't one rebut that Arduino is plug-and-play without getting your hands dirty in lower-level electronics?

rglover2• 5 months ago

The article addresses this by making the point that prototypes != production. Arduino is great for prototyping (authors opinion; I have limited experience) but not for production-level manufacturing.

LLMs are effectively (from this article's pov) the "Arduino of coding" but due to their nature, are being misunderstood/misrepresented as production-grade code printers when really they're just glorified MVP factories.

They don't have to be used this way (I use LLMs daily to generate a ton of code, but I do it as a guided, not autonomous process which yields wildly different results than a "vibed" approach), but they are because that's the extent of most people's ability (or desire) to understand them/their role/their future beyond the consensus and hype.

relaxing• 5 months ago

Not, because it isn’t. A plug and play arduino is useless without some level of circuit building expertise.

HerbManic• 5 months ago

Yep. Increases output but reduces understanding.

samusiam2• 5 months ago

It doesn't have to reduce understanding. It completely depends on how you use it. See, for example, this study

https://arxiv.org/html/2601.20245v2

ytoawwhra925• 5 months ago

Nah.

There are corners of the industry where people still write ASM by hand when necessary, but for the vast, vast majority it's neither necessary (because compilers are great) or worthwhile (because it's so time consuming).

Most code is written in high-level, interpreted languages with no particular attention paid to its performance characteristics. Despite the frustration of those of us who know better, businesses and users seem to choose velocity over quality pretty consistently.

LLM output is already good enough to produce working software that meets the stated requirements. The tooling used to work with them is improving rapidly. I think we're heading towards a world where actually inspecting and understanding the code is unusual (like looking at JVM/Python bytecode is today).

Future liabilities? Not any more than we're currently producing, but produced faster.

sarchertech6• 5 months ago

Compilers take a formal language and translate it to another formal language. In most cases there is no ambiguity, it’s deterministic, and most importantly it’s not chaotic.

That is changing one word in the source code doesn’t tend to produce a vastly different output, or changes to completely unrelated code.

Because the LLM is working from informal language, it is by necessity making thousands of small (and not so small) decisions about how to translate the prompt into code. There are far more decisions here than can reasonably fixed in tests/specs. So any changes to the prompt/spec is likely to result in unintended changes to observable behavior that users will notice and be confused by.

You’re right that programmers regularly churn out unoptimized code. But that’s very different than churning out a bubbling morass where ever little thing that isn’t bolted down is constantly changing.

The ambiguity in translation from prompt to code means that the code is still the spec and needs to be understood. Combine that with prompt instability and we’ll be stuck understanding code for the foreseeable future.

alpaca128• 5 months ago

"users seem to choose velocity over quality pretty consistently"

When do they have a real choice, without vendor lock-in or other pressure?

Windows 11 is 4 years old but until a few months ago barely managed to overtake Windows 10. Despite upgrades that were only "by choice" in the most user hostile sense imaginable (those dark patterns were so misleading I know multiple people who didn't notice that they "agreed" to it, and as it pop ups repeatedly it only takes a single wrong click to mess up). It doesn't look like people are very excited about the "velocity".

In the gaming industry AAA titles being thrown on the market in an unfinished state tends to also not go over well with the users, but there they have more power to make a choice as the market is huge and games aren't necessary tools, and such games rarely recover after a failed launch.

tsunamifury• 5 months ago

HA hey before you code then hope you roll your own silicon because otherwise its just shortcuts.

This is such high minded bullshit.

zer00eyz• 5 months ago

The central promise—that distributed digital fabrication would bring manufacturing back to America, that every city would have micro-factories, that 3D printing would decentralize production—simply didn’t materialize.

There are plenty of products now that only exist because of what it did deliver on. Any one who spends time in the niche communities where it is thriving can see that... On the low end look at Apollo automation, the story of Grismo Knives, at the high end look a Hadrian Manufacturing.

Vibe coding is a terrible name, but what a skilled dev can do with a deeply integrated AI coding assistant is amazing. It changes the calculus of "Is it worth your time" (see: https://xkcd.com/1205/ ).

Is it helpful in my day to day: it sure is. Is it far more helpful in doing all the things that have been on the back burner for YEARS? My gods yes! But none of that is matching the hype thats out there around "vibe coding".

jmull• 5 months ago

The central promise—that distributed digital fabrication would bring manufacturing back to America, that every city would have micro-factories, that 3D printing would decentralize production—simply didn’t materialize.

I never heard that. It didn’t seem like 3D-printing ever showed sings of displacing existing ways of manufacturing at scale, did it? Units per hour and dollars per unit was never its strength. It was always going to be small things (and if anything big grew out of it, those would naturally transition to the more efficient manufacturing at scale).

Vibe coding, on the other hand, is competing against hand coding, and for many use cases is considerably more efficient. It’s clearly replacing a lot of hand coding.

BTW, I think a lot of people were/are greatly overestimating the value of coding to business success. It’s fungible from a macro perspective, so isn’t a moat by itself. There’s certainly a cost, but hardly the only one if you’re trying to be the next big startup (for that, the high cost of coding was useful — something to deter potential competitors; you’ll have to make up the difference in some other way now).

Also, software is something that already scaled really well in the way businesses need it to — code written once, whether by human or LLM, can be executed billions of times for almost nothing. Companies will be happy to have a way to press down the budget of a cost center, but the delta won’t make or break that many businesses.

As always, the people selling pick-axes during the gold rush will probably do the best.

Conscat• 5 months ago

I was a kid at the time, but adults, magazines, and other children convinced me that 3D printing at home would likely replace a huge number of products. This included extremely optimistic speculation, like printers producing smart phones or houses. Then I dated a boy who used his 3D printer to substitute The Container Store at a higher cost with greater effort and lower quality, and that soured me on the concept.

dd8601fn2• 5 months ago

I remember hearing “trek replicator” in things like pop mechanics, back in the 90s.

Then it was a lot of “self replicating printers” for quite a while, which never has been a real thing.

Certainly there’s utility in the technology, and much moreso if you’re making aircraft parts. And I love prototyping with my various machines.

But I agree, it has had far more than its fair share of hype at the home printer level.

Izkata• 5 months ago

or houses

They're not common by any means, but they do exist. Walls look pretty ugly though.

kiba• 5 months ago

3d printing matured. My makerspacr's 3d printing room is now more busy than it ever been.

But the real magic happens in CAD while printers are good enough that it gets out of your way.

switchbak6• 5 months ago

I think we'll see this slowly march along. I just made some custom-designed speaker tilt mount things for my desk. Sure, it's a trivially simple example, but a lot of things are. I was able to get the exact angle I wanted, bigger than most and in a design I liked, crafted by AI in 5 minutes, and on my desk by the next morning and for a fraction of the price of a Chinese made Amazon version.

It's no replicator, but give it 5 years and it might be surprising how useful it is.

pfdietz2• 5 months ago

What we're seeing instead are companies you can send CAD files to, get estimates, and receive the parts back in a few days.

fragmede3• 5 months ago

Just like with vibecoding complains, have you tried the latest models (of 3d printers)? Specifically, Bambu's latest models make the printer a device to just use rather than the project itself. It's the Apple of 3d printing. Previously, you'd spend hours on calibrating and leveling nonsense. Latest models don't have this problem. Open the app on your phone, (doom)scroll until you find something, and just hit print from your phone. You can make it more complicated as desired, but it's not necessary to get something out of your printer.

Which apes vibecoding. ChatGPT 3.5 was laughably bad compared to codex 5.3, but if you're basing your opinion on 3.5's performance, your opinion's out of date.

jvanderbot• 5 months ago

It didn’t seem like 3D-printing ever showed sings of displacing existing ways of manufacturing at scale

No, it never seemed that way to the realists, but it was said to seem that way to the makerspheres.

jajuuka5• 5 months ago

Definitely a fantasy land ideal. Much like pitches from the Free Software Foundation of a world without copyright and IP. It's just never going to exist because reality just isn't that way.

imtringued• 5 months ago

I personally wouldn't trust the 3D-printing community. The pre-bambu lab days were pretty bleak.

Print quality is everything when it comes to 3D printing. The printing quality must keep increasing if 3D prints are to be used as finished products. People should stop printing STL artifacts into their prints. Layer lines must fade away into invisibility. Top surfaces must be impeccably smooth without any stepping. New coatings need to be developed for texturing 3d printed parts and the parts need to be ready for coating right from the print bed.

ramathornn2• 5 months ago

BTW, I think a lot of people were/are greatly overestimating the value of coding to business success.

Fully agree - We already saw dev prices drop significantly when offshore dev shops spun up. I've had great, and also horrible experiences working with devs that could produce lines of code at a fraction of the price of any senior type dev.

The higher paid engineers i've worked with are always worth their salary/hourly rate because of the way they approach problems and the solutions they come up with.

Agents are great at building out features, i'm not so sure about complex software that grows over time. Unless you know the right questions to ask, the agent misses alot. 80/20 doesn't work for systems that need 100% reliability.

nineteen999• 5 months ago

We didn't even have to offshore for lots of bad code to be written.

Looks at the scores of Ycombinator startups that wrote a shitload of awful code and failed. Good ideas, pretty websites, but not a lot of substance under the hood. The VC gathering aspect and online kudos was way more important to them than actually producing good code and a reliable product that would stand the test of time.

Pretty much the most detestable section of the HN community. IMNHSO. I notice they're much quieter than usual since the whole vibe coding thing kicked off.

tetha2• 5 months ago

The higher paid engineers i've worked with are always worth their salary/hourly rate because of the way they approach problems and the solutions they come up with.

I'm honestly just happy at the moment, because our two junior admins/platform engineers have made some really good points to me in preparation for their annual reviews.

One now completed his own bigger terraform project, with the great praise of "That looks super easy to maintain and use" from the other more experienced engineers. He figured: "It's weird, you actually end up thinking and poking at a problem for a week or two, and then it actually folds into a very small amount of code. And sure, Copilot helped a bit with some boilerplate, but that was only after figuring out how to structure and hold it".

The other is working on getting a grip on running the big temperamental beast called PostgreSQL. She was recently a bit frustrated. "How can it be so hard to configure a simple number! It's so easy to set it in ansible and roll it out, but to find the right value, you gotta search the entire universe from top to bottom and then the answer is <maybe>. AAaah I gotta yell at a team". She's on a good way to become a great DBA.

Agents are great at building out features, i'm not so sure about complex software that grows over time. Unless you know the right questions to ask, the agent misses alot. 80/20 doesn't work for systems that need 100% reliability.

Or if it's very structured and testable. For example, we're seeing great value in rebuilding a Grafana instance from manually managed to scripted dashboards. After a bit of scaffolding, some style instructions and a few example systems, you can just chuck it a description and a few queries, it just goes to successful work and just needs a little tweaking afterwards.

Similar, we're now converting a few remnants of our old config management to the new one using AI agents. Setup a good test suite first, then throw old code and examples of how the new config management does it into the context and modern models do that well. At that point, just rebuilding the system once is better than year-long deprecation plans with undecided stakeholders as mobile as a pet ferret that doesn't want to.

It's really not the code holding the platform together, it's the team and the experiences and behaviors of people.

bonesss• 5 months ago

One thought experiment I keep having when I see LLM hype: imagine if our outsourcing companies could be as blasé about copyright as OpenAI, and how profitable they could be.

I mean, rename some dudes over there to ‘transformer’, and let them copy & paste from GitHub with abandon… I know we could get a whole browser for less than a few grand.

We wouldn’t, because it’d be copyright-insane. But if we just got it indirect enough, maybe fed the info to the copiers through a ‘transforming’ browser to mirror the copyright argument, I bet we could outperform OpenAI in key metrics.

Coding is formalizing for the compiler. The other 99% of the job is softly getting the PHB not to fuck the entire company and being unique in not doing dumb shit everyone thinks is popular now but will regret soon. It’s all like IT tribal tattoos. Barely cool for a couple of years, and then a lifelong source of shielded regret.

jackp96• 5 months ago

I think it's really dependent on the software. And frankly, with the current rate of development, I feel like this continues to shift.

No, a non-engineer can't just spin up the next great app. Even with the newest models and a great prompting/testing system, I don't think you can just spit out high quality, maintainable, reliable code. But as a generalist - I'm absolutely able to ship software and tools that solve our business problems.

Right now, my company identified an expensive software platform that was set to cost us around $250k/year. People in the industry are raving about it.

I've spent 1-2 weeks recreating the core functionality (with a significantly enhanced integration into our CRM and internal analytics) in both a web app and mobile application. And it's gone far smoother than I expected. It's not done - and maybe we'll run into some blocker. But this would have taken me 6 months, at least, to build half as well.

I was an AI skeptic for most of last year. It provided value, sure, but it felt like we were plateauing. Slowing down.

I'd hoped we might be slowing down to some sort of invisible ceiling. I was faster than ever - but it very much required a level of experience that felt reasonable and fair.

It feels different now.

I'd say ~70% of my Claude Opus results just work. I tweak the UI and refactor when possible. And it runs into issues I have to solve occasionally. But otherwise? If I'm specific, if I have it brainstorm, then plan, and then implement - then it usually just works.

moomoo11• 5 months ago

Here's the thing though, and with all due respect I say this as someone who has worked with offshore teams.

They were only as good as the input they were given. They rarely went above and beyond, and most of the time getting something "good enough" was challenging. Yes, time zones, cultural differences/attitudes, and their exposure/opportunities play a big role.

What I'm saying is that teams who had bad onshore employees got horrible results. Teams that had actual systems engineers and people who could architect systems usually got great results.

For example, we were building a bleeding edge (at the time) e commerce site for one of the largest companies in the entertainment space. I made sure to work with the best people I knew at the company to design the system from the ground up. Then, we made sure the actual "functional" pieces were digestible and written plainly that we didn't need to clarify words. Nor did we write a fucking 300 page technical document. We kept things simple and effective, and all the work was broken down into as atomic pieces as possible.

The end result was that we used a team distributed between Ukraine and India to build this in about 4 months. We'd do weekly sprints, and the team had great spirits too because we actually gave a fuck about them and ensuring their success. I'm sure they're used to being scapegoats because of some lazy fucks onshore.

Now I use agents daily and have great success. However, the whole "write a sentence and AI will do it for you" is obviously bullshit. I even asked HN why I got wrong results to test what people would respond (sorry for playing you) and as I predicted they blamed me thus proving that this broader sentiment that's so prominent by "thought leaders" is stupid as fuck. So, that's where we are.

People who can actually build great systems know that it requires careful planning, deep understanding, and ability to fill in the gaps.

OakNinja2• 5 months ago

I recently wrote a blog post about exactly this, and I agree with your perspective. Vibe coding helps with showing other people your idea and get them to understand it, try it and, most importantly, help you fail fast. But as the product matures, the gains of using LLM's and agentic engineering will go from 10000% efficiency to something like maybe 30(?)% productivity gain? Which is still awesome, of course.

"The real test of Vibe coding is whether people will finally realize the cost of software development is in the maintenance, not in the creation."

https://blog.oak.ninja/shower-thoughts/2026/02/12/business-i...

tsss2• 5 months ago

It's not awesome, not for us. 30% productivity gain would be enormous. Just imagine 30% of developers losing their jobs, in addition to outsourcing and all the new graduates flooding out of colleges after CS has been hyped so much in the recent years.

hx8• 5 months ago

It didn’t seem like 3D-printing ever showed sings of displacing existing ways of manufacturing at scale, did it?

There was a point of time where some people looked at 3d printers and said "Wow, imagine how great this technology will be in 20 years." There was some amount of anticipation for multi-material printers to come around and for home printers to begin replacing traditional consumer goods. Compared to crypto, vr, and ai it doesn't look like much but 3d printing did go through a hype bubble.

mistercheph• 5 months ago

As always, the people selling pick-axes during the gold rush will probably do the best.

it's the people that sell the pickaxe pickaxes.

directevolve• 5 months ago

Let’s be real, it’s the men who run brothels.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/trump-canada-yukon-1.3235254

Lionga• 5 months ago

The people selling vibe code pick-axes are buying them for 50 dollars and selling them for 20. Not sure if they will do the best

goatlover• 5 months ago

I never heard that. It didn’t seem like 3D-printing ever showed sings of displacing existing ways of manufacturing at scale, did it? Units per hour and dollars per unit was never its strength. It was always going to be small things (and if anything big grew out of it, those would naturally transition to the more efficient manufacturing at scale).

There were articles posted on HN hyping exactly that, with comments debating whether 3D-printing would eventually replace conventional manufacturing at scale, and how people would no longer shop at stores like Walmart for their cheap products.

ehutch79• 5 months ago

BTW, I think a lot of people were/are greatly overestimating the value of coding to business success.

Uh, no they're not. Did you not see the recent announcement from unity. One short prompt and you get a whole AAA+ game in one shot.

lich_king• 5 months ago

I never heard that

I did, a lot, maybe fifteen years ago. There was a lot of talk about a "3D printing revolution" and being years away from being able to make whatever you want at home. For a while, the "maker" moniker was strongly associated with home manufacturing maximalists.

I still don't get the point the article is making, though. That 3D printer thinking was obviously naive because it underestimated the difficulty of mechanical design and the importance of the economies of scale. Using AI to "write" or "code" is a lot easier than turning a vague idea for a household good into a durable and aesthetic 3D print, so it's apples to oranges.

There are other things that the vibecoding movement is underestimating - when you pay a SaaS vendor, you're usually not paying for code as much as for having a turnkey solution where functionality, security, infrastructure, and user support are someone else's problem. But I think that's pretty much where the parallels end.

scottLobster• 5 months ago

Also hiring. It's easier to find people with JIRA experience than people in your vibe-coded ticket manager, even if it is technically superior for your application.

If there is any commonality between the 3D printing craze and vibe-coding, they're both renditions of "just because you can, doesn't mean you should".

moregrist• 5 months ago

It didn’t seem like 3D-printing ever showed sings of displacing existing ways of manufacturing at scale, did it?

It didn’t and I’m not sure anyone who knew anything about at-scale manufacturing ever saw it that way. Injection molding is far cheaper per unit and more accurate.

But 3D printing has made a major impact on prototyping. Parts that would have taken serious machine shop work or outsourcing can be printed in a few hours. It really changed the game for mechanical engineers.

In terms of vibe coding, time to demo/prototype is greatly reduced. That definitely takes time and cost away from R&D. But I don’t know that it’s had much impact on transfer to manufacturing, which can easily be the hard final 20%.

eleventyseven3• 5 months ago

I never heard that.

Once the predictions of a magical future turn out to be false, techies suddenly don't remember. Kind of like when the cult leader's prediction of doomsday doesn't show, there's always another magical prediction of a new future coming. Here are just a few major mainstream sources:

2012, Cornell Prof and Lab Director, in CNN: "We really want to print a robot that will walk out of a printer. We have been able to print batteries and motors, but we haven’t been able to print the whole thing yet. I think in two or three years we’ll be able to do that." (https://www.cnn.com/2012/07/20/tech/3d-printing-manufacturin...)

2013, World Economic Forum: "the world can be altered further if home-based 3D printing becomes the norm. In this world, every home is equipped with a printer capable of making most of the products it needs. Supply chains that support the flow of products and parts to consumers will vanish, to be replaced by supply chains of raw material." (https://www.weforum.org/stories/2013/08/will-3d-printing-kil...)

2013, President of the United States of America Barack Obama hypes up 3-D printing in the State of the Union as a technology that will bring manufacturing back to the U.S.: “A once-shuttered warehouse is now a state-of-the art lab where new workers are mastering the 3-D printing that has the potential to revolutionize the way we make almost everything..." Obama announced plans for three more manufacturing hubs where businesses will partner with the departments of Defense and Energy “to turn regions left behind by globalization into global centers of high-tech jobs.” (https://edition.cnn.com/2013/02/13/tech/innovation/obama-3d-...)

2012, Cover story and special issue of The Economist predicting another Nth industrial revolution:

"THE first industrial revolution began in Britain in the late 18th century, with the mechanisation of the textile industry. Tasks previously done laboriously by hand in hundreds of weavers’ cottages were brought together in a single cotton mill, and the factory was born. The second industrial revolution came in the early 20th century, when Henry Ford mastered the moving assembly line and ushered in the age of mass production. The first two industrial revolutions made people richer and more urban. Now a third revolution is under way. Manufacturing is going digital. As this week’s special report argues, this could change not just business, but much else besides.

A number of remarkable technologies are converging: clever software, novel materials, more dexterous robots, new processes (notably three-dimensional printing) and a whole range of web-based services. The factory of the past was based on cranking out zillions of identical products: Ford famously said that car-buyers could have any colour they liked, as long as it was black. But the cost of producing much smaller batches of a wider variety, with each product tailored precisely to each customer’s whims, is falling. The factory of the future will focus on mass customisation—and may look more like those weavers’ cottages than Ford’s assembly line." (archive: https://communicateasia.wordpress.com/2012/04/20/manufacturi...)

Freedom2• 5 months ago

It's especially funny because HN commenters are some of the most likely people to make wild, sweeping claims then once they don't come true, turn back around and say "well no one was actually saying that anyway."

tracker1• 5 months ago

At some scales, Obama was right... a lot of companies that do plastic extruded parts also do 3D printing for lower volume fulfillment. You can also do some types of parts that you couldn't make through extrusion.

inigyou4• 5 months ago

It was promised but it never materialised. Everyone was saying we'd all have a 3D printer at home and there'd be no market for niche products any more because we'd just print them on demand.

Animats4• 5 months ago

I heard the CEO of Autodesk giving a talk saying that. As a stockholder, I was disappointed. Just because his daughter could make dollhouse toys with a 3D printer didn't mean it was going to take over manufacturing.

Windchaser• 5 months ago

Just a couple days ago, I remembered hearing "what will app-making industry be like, when you can just ask a LLM to make you one whenever you want?"

pradn• 5 months ago

One of the odd things people do with tech is taking someone else's random projections at face value?

What does it mean to say "we were promised flying cars", or "every city would have micro-factories, that 3D printing would decentralize production"?

The people creating these narratives may a) truly believe it and tried to make it a reality, but failed b) never believed it at all, but failed anyway, c) or be somewhere else on this quadrant of belief vs actuality.

Why not just treat it as, "a prediction that went wrong". I suppose it's because a narrative of promise feels like a promise, and people don't like being lied to.

It's a strange narrative maneuver we keep doing with tech, which is more future-facing than most fields.

smaudet• 5 months ago

Well, there's also the almost never mentioned Rock's Law:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_second_law

We do have flying cars, and we do have printers that print other printers, but both were some combination of really expensive/poor quality. Technically speaking, if you take it that most cities have 3D printers, most cities then do have micro factories, however that says nothing about general feasability...

Technology requires infrastructure and resources, and our infrastructure is strained and our resources are even more so... Until the costs become pocket change for the average person, technology will just remain generally unavailable.

palmotea• 5 months ago

What does it mean to say "we were promised flying cars"...

I don't know about the other things you mentioned, but I think you have this in the wrong category. "We were promised flying cars" is one half of a construction contrasting utopian promises/hype with dystopian (or at lest underwhelming) outcomes. I think the most common version is:

They promised us flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.

Translation: tech promised awesome things that would make our life better, but instead we actually got was stuff like the toxicity of social media.

IMHO, this insight is one of the reasons there's so much negativity around AI. People have been around the block enough to have good reason to question tech hype, and they're expecting the next thing to turn out as badly as social media did.

aleph_minus_one11• 5 months ago

What does it mean to say "we were promised flying cars"

This promise did get fulfilled: helicopters do exist.

thfuran• 5 months ago

Companies will be happy to have a way to press down the budget of a cost center, but the delta won’t make or break that many businesses.

Software companies spend a huge amount of money on having software written. Why would significantly altering the cost structure not make or break companies?

jmalicki• 5 months ago

They're spending money on producing software, not lines of code - for now that's a distinction

naravara• 5 months ago

BTW, I think a lot of people were/are greatly overestimating the value of coding to business success.

I think I have a conversation at least weekly where I have to explain to someone that using an LLM to convert COBOL to Java (or whatever) will not actually save much effort. I don’t know how many ways to explain that translating the literal instructions from one language to another is not actually is not that hard for someone fluent in both and the actual bottleneck is in understanding what sort of business logic the COBOL has embedded in it and all the foundational rearchitecting that will involve.

bsder2• 5 months ago

It didn’t seem like 3D-printing ever showed sings of displacing existing ways of manufacturing at scale, did it?

It's really hard to beat injection molding for scale.

However, what 3D printing did shift was building molds and prototypes. And that shifted small volume manufacturing--one offs and small volumes are now practical that didn't used to be. In addition, you can iterate more easily over multiple versions.

The limiting factor, however, has always been the brain power designing the thing. YouTube is littered with videos that someone wants to build a "thing" and then spends 10-20 iterations figuring out everything they didn't know going into the project. This is no different from "real" projects, but your experienced engineering staff probably only take 5 iterations instead of 20.

pm902• 5 months ago

Correct. Almost nobody talked about “getting manufacturing back to the US”. Almost always it was just people glad they could build things.

Its also interesting how the author frames the results: Shenzhen is now better than it was ever before at manufacturing. The maker culture succeeded!

eleventyseven3• 5 months ago

Almost nobody talked about “getting manufacturing back to the US”.

I guess the President of the United States is an almost nobody. Obama's 2013 State of the Union hyped up 3-D printing explicitly as a tech that would be bringing manufacturing back to the U.S. The U.S. government made public-private partnerships with maker spaces and fab facilities in hollowed out Rust Belt cities, and Obama mentioned it by name in the most important and viewed policy speech the President gives each year.

“A once-shuttered warehouse is now a state-of-the art lab where new workers are mastering the 3-D printing that has the potential to revolutionize the way we make almost everything,” Obama said. [...] Obama announced plans for three more manufacturing hubs where businesses will partner with the departments of Defense and Energy “to turn regions left behind by globalization into global centers of high-tech jobs.” (https://edition.cnn.com/2013/02/13/tech/innovation/obama-3d-...)

bob1029• 5 months ago

BTW, I think a lot of people were/are greatly overestimating the value of coding to business success.

I've frequently argued to my organization's leadership that the product could be open source on GitHub with a flashing neon sign above it and it wouldn't change anything about the business. A competitor stealing our codebase would probably be worse off than if they had done anything else. Conway's law and all that.

appellations• 5 months ago

The problem wouldn’t be your competitors cribbing your ideas, it would be more like letting anyone with a bone to pick audit you for minor compliance violations, customers relying on internal implementation details or judging you unfairly for legacy horrors, or devs getting self conscious about their sloppy 2am fix and prolonging an outage for rational public image/ego reasons

zahlman• 5 months ago

Vibe coding, on the other hand, is competing against hand coding, and for many use cases is considerably more efficient. It’s clearly replacing a lot of hand coding.

It seems like a lot of vibe coders are people who otherwise wouldn't be coding at all.

gtowey2• 5 months ago

Yeah, it's like saying that the amateur rocketry guys on youtube are going to replace NASA.

TurdF3rguson• 5 months ago

If you're a web dev you're vibe coding. You might not be admitting it, but you're using those tools. Because you would be crazy not to.

evilfred• 5 months ago

vibe coding is only "more efficient" if you ignore the massive energy costs involved

leptons2• 5 months ago

3D printing is giving my company many benefits over injection molding. We have 6 variations of the case for our device and we're always coming up with improvements and new functionality, and new products. I only see us expanding our in-house resin print farm instead of building out injection molds. No, we aren't selling millions of units, but injection molding is just too expensive for anything but a 1-size-fits-all solution.

noelsusman• 5 months ago

The people who did best during the gold rush were the people who went out and were lucky enough to find stockpiles of gold.

analog31• 5 months ago

There was certainly a contingent who believed that 3d printing was going to replace all other forms of manufacturing. It was even going to make custom food for us on order.

If you balked at the idea, then you were the bad guy, or treated with pity for being so out of touch. Usually you got the Kubler-Ross Stages thrown at you.

Animats4• 5 months ago

There was certainly a contingent who believed that 3d printing was going to replace all other forms of manufacturing. It was even going to make custom food for us on order.

Yes. Met those guys in my TechShop days. They also insisted that 3D printers should be made with 3D printers, which resulted in a generation of flimsy, inaccurate machines.

The current generation of serious 3D printers is very impressive. Take a look at Space-X's Raptor engine. A rocket engine is mostly one piece of complicated metal with a lot of internal voids. That's something 3D printers are good at. Once 3D printing was able to print stainless steel and titanium, it could be used for hard jobs like that. PLA just isn't much of a structural material, even with 100% fill.

Serious 3D printers are found in machine shops, not homes and libraries.

dheera2• 5 months ago

I also don't think the "maker movement" disappeared, it's just that the bar for making stuff is so much lower now that anyone and their grandmother can do it.

In the past weeks I:

- 3D printed custom cups that fit onto a pet feeder to prevent ants from getting to our cat food

- 3D printed custom mounts to mount 3W WS2812 LEDs to illuminate Chinese New Year lanterns and connected them to an ESP32 WLED box connected to home assistant

- Connected an vision language model to a security camera that can answer questions about how many times a cat has eaten, drank water, used the toilet, and inform us about any things in the room that look abnormal

- Custom laser cutted a wall fitting for a portable heat pump input and output condenser hoses and added a condensate pump to the contraption, it saves us $200/month in heating costs

- Custom designed a retrofit for a sliding door that accepts a Nuki smart lock that wasn't designed for this type of door.

- Custom laser cutted a valentines day card in Chinese paper cutting style that was generated with many rounds of back and forth prompting with Gemini, then converted to SVG and cut

- My wife and I thought IKEA SKADIS pegboards would look better if they were made out of bamboo plywood, so I shoved a sheet of bamboo into my laser cutter and had it cut out a pegboard that looked much nicer, sprayed it with lacquer, then attached it to the wall with 3D printed mounting hardware. The SVG for the pegboard was generated by a script written by Cursor and took a couple of minutes.

- Having an ESP32 feed a camera image to an LLM and then do something with the result is a piece of cake. A box that "sprays water to deter the cat if the cat jumps on the kitchen counter" is a 1-hour job after you order the components from Amazon, and an LLM will build that parts list for you, too.

- Reverse enginereed the firmware of a Unifi Chime to upload more chime sounds than the UI limits you to, so that I can have Unifi Protect announce if there is an intruder somewhere late at night and where. Cursor reverse-engineered the firmware .bin for me.

A lot of this could have been worth sharing 10 years ago. Now all of this is just "normal life in 2026" so you don't hear about it much. I'm used to thinking of something and then physically having it <12 hours later. It's no longer an undertaking. It's not news anymore.

The bar for "news-worthiness" for makers these days? This guy built an entire city for his cats, with a full functional subway system and everything ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4UEugp_mf0

rcxdude• 5 months ago

I think volume and cost was never really the issue. Even if 3D printing something was 3x the cost it could justify itself just by the sheer amount of overhead it can otherwise remove. Ultimately what limits 3D printing is what you can make with it, and the fact that it doesn't remove assembly as a manufacturing step. If you could 3D print full products then I think the promised revolution would have happened. (As it stands 3D printing has already had a massive impact on manufacturing. More stuff than you would think is 3D printed now, it's just not complete consumer items)

(Not to mention, it's only in the last few years where consumer-accessible 3D printers are more than hobbyist grade that required a huge amount of tinkering to actually work properly)

aleph_minus_one11• 5 months ago

and the fact that it doesn't remove assembly as a manufacturing step

Prusa is working on a Pick & Place Toolhead for the Prusa XL to enable at least some very specific assembly steps to be done on this 3D printer:

https://blog.prusa3d.com/xl-in-2026-new-toolheads-lower-pric...

"One Print, Multiple Components: Pick & Place Tool

Some technical prints require additional components, such as magnets, threaded inserts, or bearings, to be placed during the build. Without automation, this typically means you have to pause the print and insert the part(s) by hand. Although PrusaSlicer made this process easier a while ago, The Pick & Place toolhead can do it for you, completely autonomously. This reduces manual intervention and improves placement accuracy.

We’ve co-developed the toolhead with the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) and it’s designed for models that combine 3D-printed models with off-the-shelf components. We’re currently targeting late 2026 with its implementation."

iancmceachern• 5 months ago

> The central promise—that distributed digital fabrication would bring manufacturing back to America, that every city would have micro-factories, that 3D printing would decentralize production—simply didn’t materialize.
never heard that.

This book was a big deal, promised it ("Makers, the next industrial revolution") https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/makers-chris-anderson/11109...

aleph_minus_one11• 5 months ago

This book was a big deal, promised it ("Makers, the next industrial revolution") https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/makers-chris-anderson/11109...

Interestingly, I am not aware that this book was really popular or well-known in Germany (I honestly hear about this specific book for the first time, though I am aware that some marketers (who in my opinion did not really understand the Maker scene or 3D printing) made such claims).

Instead, at that time, in Germany nerds were getting excited about understanding how to build 3D printers (in particular partially self-replicating ones (RepRap)) and how 3D printing

- could be used to make yourself much more independent of the discretion of part manufacturers (i.e. some part is broken? Use a CAD system to re-design it and 3D-print your re-design),

- makes you capable of building stuff in small scale "that should exist", but no manufacturer is producing,

- enables part designs that are (nearly) impossible to manufacture using any other existing technology, and thus basically enables you to completely reimagine and improve how nearly every produced part that you see around you is designed,

- ...

I would say that the mentioned nerd visions of this time have at least partially been implemented and/or are on a good way towards this goal. It's just that the practical implementations did not come with a spectacular change in the overarching mindet of society, but rather are highly important, but not (necessarily) revolutionary changes in the lifes of people who want these changes to be part of their life.

deadbabe• 5 months ago

Vibe coding, on the other hand, is competing against hand coding, and for many use cases is considerably more efficient. It’s clearly replacing a lot of hand coding.

Vibe coding, like 3D printing, is great for little small batch runs of boutique code. Small toy apps and throwaway projects.

Vibe coding is shit for doing actual maintenance on important projects that actually run the world. It is shit for creating anything that is of robust long lasting quality. It is shit for creating code you can trust. It is shit for creating code that won’t suddenly reveal flaws and inefficiencies at scale and require an entire proper rewrite just when your product is finally gaining traction. Vibe coding has not been around long enough to make these problems obvious yet, but the time is coming. A few high profile failures will hit the media and then suddenly everyone starts coming out of the woodwork with their own vibe coding horror stories and thus the AI bubble collapse begins.

What people will eventually realize, is that if you’re building a serious business with software that must run reliably for years, it really doesn’t give you any advantage being able to vibe code something in a week vs carefully building something out over a few months. Being unable to vibe code your way out of non-trivial maintenance issues is a death sentence for your business, you will need people who know what they are doing eventually.

Relying on vibe coding causes you to have a talent debt, and though you won’t feel it when you’re first rolling out a business, eventually, the bill comes due…

jlarocco• 5 months ago

I agree with you. To me the maker movement has always been about people wanting to tinker and create things for themselves. If anything "vibe coding" makes the maker movement more accessible because people who couldn't (or didn't want to) code can try to have AI code the thing they're building.

And there are plenty of people in the maker movement who enjoy writing code, and will write it whether other people are vibe coding or not.

BobbyJo2• 5 months ago

BTW, I think a lot of people were/are greatly overestimating the value of coding to business success.

Personally, I don't believe the big changes will come from "coding costs less for businesses". I think it will come from "trying new businesses is now cheaper, both in time and money". Smaller and cheaper players will be entering a lot of spaces over the next 5 years IMO.

heavyset_go2• 5 months ago

The great thing about vibecoding is we're at the point where people like me have to come in to fix core problems for apps and platforms that non-domain experts are outputting as slop.

Those problems span from fundamental architecture flaws, to issues anyone who spent 5 minutes reading the docs would never do, like create an entire app that slows to a crawl when more than one user uses it, because all parallel work gets serialized due to a complete misunderstanding of how concurrency, async/await and threads work in the language they're "writing".

People with too much money build entire apps on foundations that crumble and significantly hold them back from doing simple things, and I love it.

dakolli• 5 months ago

Maybe its replacing the simplistic forms of backend web development and the keast capable frontend devs. If your job was building with DaisyUI/Tailwind you're prob replaceable by this tech. People building their first SaaS are amazed (its literally heroin for non technical idea guys). But serious engineers I know, old heads, don't seem to be that impressed and neither am I.

I don't see it competing with anyone doing anything serious, outside of ML engineers and lets be honest, they always sucked at writing code, hated writing code so its not surprising how much they sing it's praise.

dheera2• 5 months ago

3D printing was never intended to replace scale manufacturing; the media seemed to conjure up that story.

To the realists, 3D printing is specifically for small-scale manufacturing, rapid iteration on prototypes, etc.

edanm• 5 months ago

I never heard that. It didn’t seem like 3D-printing ever showed sings of displacing existing ways of manufacturing at scale, did it?

It absolutely was the "promise" the media spun.

I had the relatively unique experience of moving from being an outsider to this field to being an insider. While I was an outsider, my impressions, formed by the media, was exactly that—3d printing would be the next big revolution, in a few years there'd be a printer in every home, etc.

I then joined a company that allocated a lot of resources to 3d printing. It only took me a month or two to realize that the big media claims were absolutely ridiculous, and didn't make any sense as stated. They misunderstood the state of the technology, and misunderstood basic economics and how regular manufacturing works.

That's not to say there's no value in 3d printing or the maker movement. There's a ton of value that's been uncovered. But the specific media dream of "people will be printing their plates at home instead of buying them in the store" was never real.

(Btw, IMO "vibe coding" is absolutely real and revolutionary, likely the biggest revolution in the software industry since, idk, the invention of the computer itself. And AI more generally is, even beyond vibe coding aspect, a revolutionary technology that will change the world in many ways.)

noduerme• 5 months ago

> BTW, I think a lot of people were/are greatly overestimating the value of coding to business success. It’s fungible from a macro perspective, so isn’t a moat by itself.

Broadly true if you have $10M to throw at it, and know exactly what you want, or if what you want isn't something involving a "secret sauce".

But between competing startups doing something novel, original software is a moat. No moat is permanent; you leverage it into market share while you have time.

And no software itself is a secret, but the business logic and real-world operations it distills and caters to may be. The software is the least obfuscated part of encoding that set of operational logic, or even trade secrets, which are the DNA of a business and dictate the tools it goes into battle with.

Software being a moat (which it rarely is for long) is more of a question for the software industry. For other industries, software that amplifies best practices and crystalizes operational flow from the business logic can absolutely extend whatever moat the company already has.

In the small bore, if you have two midsized competing $100m companies in some arbitrary industry, the one that uses SaaS may be well behind the one that invested $1m in their own in-house software from the beginning, mostly because the one with SaaS must work their business logic around certain shortcomings, while the other can devise and deploy workflows for employees that may themselves create a new advantage the other company hasn't considered.

raw_anon_1111• 5 months ago

if you have two midsized competing $100m companies in some arbitrary industry, the one that uses SaaS may be well behind the one that invested 1m in their own in-house software from the beginning, mostly because the one with SaaS must work their business logic around certain shortcomings, while the other can devise and deploy workflows for employees that may themselves create a new advantage the other company hasn't considered.

Counter anecdote: about a decade ago I was brought in by the new to the company director to lead the modernization of their in house Electronic Medical System software that was built on FoxPro in 1999 running with SQL Server 2000 and was maintained by two “developers” who had been their for a decade.

I led another project there first that was more pressing - in house mobile software maintained by two other “developers”. It was built on top of a mobile framework by a local startup. It was used by home health care nurses for special needs kids.

After I got my head around the business, what they were trying to do - PE owned and acquiring other companies whose systems they need to integrate and their margins were low - mostly Medicaid reimbursements - I decided the best thing I could do was put myself out of a job.

I told the director we have no business trying to build up a software development department. We moved everything to various SaaS products and paid consulting companies to make all of the customizations. Meaning they sign a statement of work and come back with a finished product.

Software development was never going to be this company’s competitive moat. They got rid of the two developers maintaining the mobile app and contracted that out. The two other developers who had maintained the FoxPro app became “data analysts” and report writers.

Every company does need to know its numbers

asdff2• 5 months ago

People thought 3d printing would be democratized like the inkjet printer when it first came about. And that would be powerful because so many trips to the store would be eliminated, so many lines of business put out, so many things changed from taking all that plastic junk at walmart or spare parts for your car plus everything in between and letting you snap your fingers and having it appear in your home, in every persons home.

Seems like today they are still stuck in the tracks they were in 2016. A couple nerds own them personally. Maybe you'd find them in a maker space or a library or school. Not in your boomer parent's office though.

ge96• 5 months ago

no it'll encourage more people to try new things

edit: I read this title wrong, thought it said "end the maker movement"

personally I enjoy creation and writing code so I'm not going to vibe code my hobby/passion project, I don't care if theoretically it'll save me x amount of time, the code is rote for me anyway but I have to be actively engaged in it to enjoy it

stavros7• 5 months ago

I don't know about anyone else, but since vibe coding, I'm making more things than I've ever made before. Just a constant stream of making, all day.

Couldn't be happier. I make things because I want to see them exist, not because it was hard.

teaearlgraycold2• 5 months ago

To be clear I’m not sure what I’m doing is vibe coding because I write some of the code and read/understand what the LLM writes.

I think I’m learning less (about the code) but making more. Maybe that’s okay? There are other things to learn about. My code has users, it processes money. I user test, I iterate, I see what works and what they need.

stavros7• 5 months ago

Yeah, the term "vibe coding" is really overloaded these days. I, too, make detailed plans for the LLM, but that's just what works for me, I don't care enough to give it an exact name. I'm having fun, and that's what counts.

boznz2• 5 months ago

Ditto. I have done 6 projects over the last 12 months, and wrote up 3 of them on my web site, I also usually post a link either here, or hackaday, or the other maker sites, most of my work these days is repurposing broken commercial or consumer electronics by replacing the PCB's to give things a second life (eg <https://rodyne.com/?p=3380>). I've been making things since 1981, vibe coding just makes it easier for me to work with more complicated stuff.

stavros7• 5 months ago

Oh man, I have that exact same CD player! That project is great, well done.

keybored5• 5 months ago

And I make visualizations by watching TV every day. My visual cortex just has a constant stream of making visualizations all day.

All these maker types dropping that differentiator immediately in the name of pragmatism.

stavros7• 5 months ago

Yeah whatever, I'm not going to let you gatekeep my enjoyment. What's the last thing you made?

slopinthebag4• 5 months ago

Usually people would try to become rich so they could pay others to make stuff for them, now you can just spend a moderate amount of money having an LLM make it for you.

waffletower• 5 months ago

The author writes as if he didn't know 'aider' even existed. "Vibe coding skipped that phase entirely" is dead wrong. What may be different is that the cycle was incredibly short before Anthropic made it mainstream with Claude Code. Gemini CLI, definitely a Claude Code imitator, existed long before The New York Times knew what Claude Code was. Openclaw -- a decidedly different agentic AI application -- is part of another period where weirdos are playing with tools.

giancarlostoro3• 5 months ago

Did the maker movement end? I dont think so, its just as niche as its always been. We have plenty of maker type posts on here. I dont think “vibe” coding is going away. Especially with so many open source models you can run on a simple Mac.

KaiserPro3• 5 months ago

To me the maker movement is alive as ever. Sure the arduino has died a death, but pico, esp32 and various other microcontrollers evolved the entire system, and with wifi too.

fishpen0• 5 months ago

I think it stunted out. Outside of only the densest areas, maker spaces never really formed. The stuff remains accessible as a hobby only to the wealthy who can afford all these tools and machines in the majority of the country. I'm a nearly 40 minute drive to the closest maker space and I'm in one of the 10 densest populated cities in the country. The last city I lived in, the maker space was too popular and raised their fees so high that it is also impossibly inaccessible to most people.

giancarlostoro3• 5 months ago

I'm not trying to defend maker spaces, though they make more sense to me in a college setting. My college had (has?) one and one of our professors really made sure to always use it, and have students use it and learn. Immense value there, even if only a dozen or less use it every year, its still an avenue for inspiration.

jajuuka5• 5 months ago

I saw that happen in a decent sized college town near where I live. They had a maker space spring up when 3D printing was the hottest thing. It didn't last very long though. I'm a bit surprised that 3D printer machines haven't become cheaper. Like solid machines sub-$100. 3D printer pens are the only thing that came close to doing that.

Bjartr• 5 months ago

It didn't end, it just failed to commercialize, which IMO is a better outcome anyway. Many more communities today have something akin to a maker space than before the movement. It succeeded to a point that it became mundane.

geerlingguy• 5 months ago

The commercialization is still ongoing, though the market is small enough it's been a struggle for any company pushing towards proprietary solutions and ecosystems to capture the whole market.

Which as you say, is a good thing. I still fear what will happen if 3D printing commoditizes into a similar structure as 2D printing.

smileysteve• 5 months ago

Did the maker movement end? I dont think so

Bump.

Because we had our first high profile murder using a 3d printed weapon just last year.

ihaveajob• 5 months ago

Yes, that made me sad. I just got into Arduino. I guess I'll have to stop now!

bandrami5• 5 months ago

I mean, the demoscene is still around too, in the sense of some number of people still do it.

Aurornis2• 5 months ago

and it has to do with how the Maker Movement actually ended.
The central promise—that distributed digital fabrication would bring manufacturing back to America, that every city would have micro-factories, that 3D printing would decentralize production—simply didn’t materialize.

This version of the Maker Movement only ever existed in news articles and hype bubbles.

The Maker Movement was never about building small factories and consumer 3D printing was never about manufacturing things at scale. Everyone who was into 3D printing knew that we weren't going to be 3D printing all of our plastic parts at home because the limitations of FDM printing are obvious to anyone who has used one. At the time, consumer 3D printers were rare so journalists were extrapolating from what they saw and imagined a line going up and to the right until they could produce anything you wanted in your home.

The Maker Movement where people play with Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and cheap 3D printers is possibly stronger than ever. Everything is so cheap and accessible now. 10 years ago getting a 3D printer to produce parts was a chore that required a lot of knowledge and time. Now for a couple hundred dollars anyone can have a 3D printer at home that is mostly user friendly and lets them focus on printing things.

The real version of the Maker Movement just isn't that interesting to mainstream because, well, it's a bunch of geeks doing geeky things. There's also sadly a lot of unnecessary infighting and drama that occurs in maker-related companies, like the never ending Arduino company drama, the recent Teensy drama that goes back years, or the way some people choose their 3D printer supplier as their personal identity would rather argue about them online than print.

alwillis• 5 months ago

> The central promise—that distributed digital fabrication would bring manufacturing back to America, that every city would have micro-factories, that 3D printing would decentralize production—simply didn’t materialize.
This version of the Maker Movement only ever existed in news articles and hype bubbles.

That version of the Maker Movement was heavily pushed by city and the state government in Massachusetts. They put money into it; foundations funded it.

It was seen as a way to give students another pathway for those who weren't interested in going to college. I've seen first hand how some kids who weren't interested school or academics really got into the Maker thing, which got them into STEM.

Some of them ended up going to college to study engineering and related fields. Some of them ended up working in related fields and started their own businesses.

As time went on, it became clear to me that the Maker Movement wasn’t going to go mainstream, although 3D printing has found another niche audience recently in the home lab space. Many home-labbers on YouTube 3D print their own cases and other parts.

There will be normies that take up vibe coding like some knit their own sweaters or grow their own food because they enjoy it.

And there will be Fortune 500 companies that will vibe code certain products.

ManuelKiessling• 5 months ago

I said this with a lot less words recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47105372

dubeye• 5 months ago

I'm hearing most of this for the first time, and it sounds ridiculous. Anyone who grows their own veg knows decentralisation is a terrible idea

fortran77• 5 months ago

The "Maker" movement and "vibe coding" have changed the way I do things. I 3D print several things a month, and now I make PC boards with KiCad, etc. It's an incremental change, but a change nonetheless

yieldcrv• 5 months ago

right now I think there's just a backlog of things to build

from individual tinkerers and ideas guys cranking out all the projects they would have never subsidized, there's a lot of that

and with corporations I'm seeing there are lots of products that would have taken 8 quarters to do, all being compressed into one now. The flip side is that all 8 quarters wouldn't have been allowed to happen as priorities would have shifted before the product or feature roadmap was ever allowed to get that far, but instead now all of it is being built out and other iterations and directions are being done simultaenously

after all of this is shown not to be saving money, or creating much value because they're doing too much without market validation, then a more intelligent approach will occur and less vibe coding will occur

dvfjsdhgfv• 5 months ago

Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

No, because too much money has been pumped into it.

janalsncm• 5 months ago

I wasn’t aware the maker movement ended. There are all sorts of cool things we can do with on-device ML that have major privacy and convenience benefits over Claude in the cloud. In fact with hardware improvements I think integrated intelligence will be heating up.

w10-1• 5 months ago

I disagree with too much philosophizing around both Makers and vibe coding. The actual incentives are curiosity and a desire to build what one cannot buy (and using that for teaching initiative in kids) - not AGI or transforming society.

Physical making is hard: you run up against the limits of plastic or the difficulty of cnc planning for various materials, as well as the limited value for small projects: people rarely make entire projects, instead making parts. So there is an upper bound for the utility of making. (btw, anyone have a laser welder or steel-capable CNC's they're tired of?)

Software making is what you make it, subject to the laws of complexity, and as valuable as its integration (computers, robotics). These in theory are limiting, but in practice there are effectively an infinite supply of valuable projects when the cost of production reduces. Deployments will be limited by access to customers, which is not a problem when people make software for themselves.

brcmthrowaway• 5 months ago

The maker movement directly helped bring about AI. Likely every top OpenAi engineer did a blinky project with Arduino that helped them improve their general problem solving skills.

0xbadcafebee2• 5 months ago

Nah. The most universal rule of human nature is humans be lazy. Makers do extra effort for no real gain. Vibe coders do less effort for more gain. Vibe coding is what everyone wanted computers to be from the beginning. Tell it what to do, it does it.

Actually, the future isn't vibe coding, it's vibe agenting. GPT 5.3 is so advanced, you don't need to write a program to do something. You tell the agent what you want, and it does it for you by "using" desktop apps like a person. If it can't do it manually, it'll write a program to do it. That's where we're headed.

inigyou4• 5 months ago

At the same time, the quality of all this is absolute dogshit poor, so the market for things that actually work properly is probably still there. Which CEO recently had OpenClaw delete all their mail?

0xbadcafebee2• 5 months ago

It's really not bad quality. The code written by AI is pretty decent now and fixing it is easy too. There are people making poor decisions with the technology (like OpenClaw); that doesn't make the technology bad.

With AI you can build tools fast. You can then version and release those tools, and improve them, fast. Then the AI can use that version of that tool. This gives the AI a fixed set of deterministic functionality that works the same way every time.

The CSO that had all their mail deleted happened because the tools they have right now aren't very good. Whatever that mail tool was, could be easily modified to have a limiter added that stops attempts to mass-delete emails. Hell, your own email client already will prompt you to confirm if you really want to "delete all emails" - because humans are stupid, like AI, and make mistakes, like AI. They just have to build the guardrails in, rather than hoping and praying that the AI will "behave itself". If the AI is a monkey at a joystick, we still control all the machinery attached to the joystick.

linkjuice4all• 5 months ago

3D printing does bear some similarity to vibe coding/LLM-generated code. I do occasionally see "product" 3D printed items but the bigger value-add for 3D printing has been rapid prototyping and then running that design through actual production testing.

An example 3D workflow: Prototype design -> 3D print -> test/break -> production design -> real manufacturing process

The equivalent vibe code Vibecobe -> slop -> test/break -> real developers -> real development process

The real test for vibe coded stuff (much like 3D printed crap at craft fairs) will be if someone actually buys it. But much like those 'makers', vibe coders will have to go through the "real development process" if they want to make money at scale.

intended• 5 months ago

This is a damn good article, for the purpose and assistance it aims to provide. I’m curious what steps led the author to write these thoughts down.

anshulagx• 5 months ago

This misses the point that AI is not just vibe coding, but the same opus 4.6 is also exceptionally good at idea generation, content generation, research etc etc.

It is not just vibe coding that is being developed, but general intellegence.

geldedus2• 5 months ago

when i see an article that still mistakes AI-assisted programming with vibe coding , hard skip for me

LarsDu883• 5 months ago

Vibe coding isn't so much a movement as a big fat tool that was air dropped from space after the megacorps decided to dump billions of dollars into LLMs and LLM companies.

It's like comparing Christianity to water wheels or gay pride to to the Saturn V rocket. It's just not really analogous in any way.

I do agree with the author about commoditization, however.

The most likely outcome is that software will be commoditized and software developers commoditized even harder. If we still need software engineers to prompt, you'll find plenty of people in India able to do those tasks, not necessarily with great quality until they too are replaced by better AI.

This whole situation inspired me to actually dive harder into Maker type stuff such as learning how to design PCBs, but one thing I found is that this TOO is very close to being automated by AI. To actually get hardware made, even prototyping PCBs, you NEED to go to China, and the Trump tariffs cut into the cost of doing these activities hard.

inigyou4• 5 months ago

Circuit design has been on the cusp of being automated ever since there were computers. It's been over twenty years of autolayout tools and they're still not very good.

Maybe you could research how to make your own PCBs? It can be done at home with a little equipment and then you can offer it as a service to others.

LarsDu883• 5 months ago

The thing is, the cost of making them at home is both laborious, poorly reproducible, and lower quality than getting it done at JLPCB. In the old days, it was done with an exacto and rubylith. Today it requires a laser setup for about $4000 and you still need to manually apply and remove a resin layer. It's mostly not worth it to do things this way, and you lose the ability to have more than 2 layers in your board.

The bigger issue with PCBs is that even with a nice prototype, actual manufacturing needs to be done in Shenzen for any sort of cost competitiveness if you want to step outside of the hobby realm (just as the author of this essay stated).

It's really, really hard to see where the USA stands in the value chain any more once LLMs have been deployed. If all the physical manufacturing lives in China, where the manufacturing supply chain also lives, and Chinese AI companies can very very easily distill US LLM models, the two remaining US advantages is actually just the dollar's role as reserve currency --- something that crypto bros and the US president is working on eroding at a record pace, and the fact that this overvalued dollar gets all the smart people in China and India to emigrate to the US -- also becoming politically less viable.

tejtm• 5 months ago

plugging Osh Park as a non overseas PCB alternative (no affiliation)

[0] https://oshpark.com/

LarsDu883• 5 months ago

I'm aware of osh park, but it's immediately apparent how they are not cost competitive to China, and that this is a structural issue

adventured• 5 months ago

The outsource-prompting-to-India stage will almost entirely be skipped (it already has been).

Developing nations that were looking to tech to climb the economic ladder, are watching that ladder be pulled up.

Most of the upside will go to the US and China. Europe is lagging shockingly on AI spend, they're extremely far behind (but with constant plan announcements). If you didn't know any better, you'd think Europe believed the year was 2010.

kseniamorph• 5 months ago

The comparison feels off to me. The Maker Movement was an actual movement with a shared ideology of self-transformation through building. People identified with it. Vibe coding is just a description of a practice. The term covers a broad range of people: developers building components in languages they don't know, people trying to ship something fast and cash out, enthusiasts, and plenty of developers who are just too lazy to do their job. Any generalizations about what this "means for society" are going to be strained by definition. The author partially senses this. He writes that vibe coding "skipped the scenius phase" but misses why. I think there was no scenius phase because there was no movement in the first place. The tool just became available to everyone at once.

storus• 5 months ago

Maker movement was a great success, but in China, not in the US.

niemandhier• 5 months ago

Why would it? I have a 3d printer and a laser cutter because i want to make things that few other people want.

If at all it will make me do more little hyper specific projects.

HumblyTossed• 5 months ago

No. AI assisted coding ("vibe coding") will not go away, but the hype around it will as it becomes incorporated into development like any other tool. You'll be expected to use it at work (for "productivity" reasons), but if you enjoy the act of coding and problem solving, you still won't have to for personal projects.

robsonglima• 5 months ago

Sorry guys, but The big rollback is coming.

transitorykris• 5 months ago

There was also something subtle that happened, and it seemed to happen quite rapidly, a little over a decade ago. "Maker" started being used to mean more than just 3D printing hackers and started to refer to engineers, and then others "making" things.. but the watering down wasn't the end of it, it became a way to praise a certain class of employee. The resentment that generated (say, sales, marketing, etc) and the bizarre uses of "Maker", I believe contributed to it's demise.

t_sea• 5 months ago

TIL the Maker movement died I guess?

drivers99• 5 months ago

News to me. denhac has grown from 500 members to 600 in the last year since I joined. The space is constantly evolving and they'll be moving to a another larger location (again).

pm902• 5 months ago

Hard disagree with this take. Mass adoption of any technology is almost always a good thing; the more people are looking at the sane problem, the more clever/elegant/innovative solutions come out of it.

Im also not sure if “vibe coding” did not have a phase where early adopters were mucking around? I saw the early versions of gpt much earlier than chatgpt and a lot of folks were using transformers for coding before claude.

tartoran• 5 months ago

The 3D printer hype bubble wasn't as big as the current AI bubble, I'd even characterize it by enthusiasm rather than call it a hype. However, 3D printers have come a long way, they've become commoditized and affordable. More and more people jump in all the time and the maker movement continues, the niche is growing at a steay rate. I'd be curious to see how this evolves in the next 5 to 10 years.

canxerian• 5 months ago

Participating in the maker movement achieved a few things: it signalled you had intellectual curiosity, that you were a man who could do things with his hands, and that you fixed things, rather than bought new - thereby increasing your green credentials.

Vibe coding does none of the above

davesque• 5 months ago

I don't understand this. I use agentic coding to do things more quickly. And it's not just toys. I end up with software that both works and is useful. Assuming AI models powerful enough to drive that process continue to be available, why would I stop doing it?

techblueberry• 5 months ago

Th is isn't discussing individuals, it's discussing trends as a whole. There are still plenty of makers getting value out of 3d printers as well, but it's not everyone like we talk about everyone becoming a software developer with vibe coding.

asdff2• 5 months ago

Software is just a collection of functions. Some input returns some output.

That is what people do every day with LLM. When they ask LLM to do something, they are being software developers without them or you even realizing it. But what are they doing but building something with the LLM that takes digital input and returns digital output. It is software. Summarize this email for me gpt. That is a tool.

keybored5• 5 months ago

Specifically: consumption of a surplus intelligence.

Lots of powerplants to fuel the surplus.

nicetryguy2• 5 months ago

Ok, i just generally disagree with the premise. Why does it have to be "100% vibe coded" or "0% vibe coded"? There is a very happy medium that is getting ignored here. As a coder with various language experiences, i can just get like a good kick and a template with Claude and continue in any language i want and have the LLM do the redundant parts. As someone with some soldering experience, i could have an LLM cook up and explain a circuit that might have taken me months trying to mangle myself. I think LLMs empower creativity more than ever, and creative people can have a wonderful time with LLMs softening the initial headbanging and tedious redundancies of any project.

ElijahLynn• 5 months ago

LLMs = The Age of the Builder

Never has it been more exciting to be a builder (software)! So much momentum and so little getting blocked. I am learning faster than ever even with LLMs doing so much of the heavy lifting. It is so fast to iterate and just MAKE STUFF!!!

nicetryguy2• 5 months ago

I'm right there with you!

incognito124• 5 months ago

I wonder if you'll remember next year what you're building today. My guess is: no, you're not actually learning or remembering anything you build

ori_b• 5 months ago

LLMs are the age of the builder in the same way that Uber eats is the age of the home cook.

eibrahim• 5 months ago

The maker movement comparison is interesting but I think it breaks down in one key way: the marginal cost of software distribution is basically zero. 3D printing still requires physical materials and shipping. Vibe coded apps can reach users instantly if there's a discovery mechanism.

The real parallel might be the early web era where anyone could make a website but finding them required Yahoo directories and later Google. Right now vibe coded apps have the same discovery problem - they exist but there's no effective way to find or evaluate them.

computersuck• 5 months ago

You’re left reaching inward for something that the process never required you to develop, and the gap between the effort you expected to invest and the effort that was actually needed starts to feel like a personal failure rather than a feature of the technology.

protocolture• 5 months ago

No, shoosh.

tracerbulletx• 5 months ago

Scaling manufacturing is pretty different from scaling software.

hi_hi• 5 months ago

I don't understand the fascination and focus on Vibe Coding.

Sure, you can do that, it's an option, but no serious engineering effort is being left entirely up to the AI.

Vibe coding is essentially the Jackson Pollock approach to software building. Throw a bunch of paint down, with very little control, and look, we have something novel.

It doesn't mean your going to replace all the ways of making art with paint throwing.

I'd love to start seeing more discussions about alternative approaches to working with AI. The recent Vinext article was great https://blog.cloudflare.com/vinext/. This seems to be "the way" for working with AI in a high stakes production environment, but what other ways are there.

I fear the focus on vibe coding is diluting and taking focus away from far better alternatives. Maybe because the narrative around those aren't quite so dramatic?

ogou• 5 months ago

The maker movement evolved. It didn't disappear. Once the tools became accessible to a much wider audience, such as children, it became an integrated aspect of education. It also became a cultural tool. The author is focusing on a very narrow path to monetization and manufacturing. That wasn't the goal of the movement at all. That was how startup pitches tried to capture the movement and extract value. I see 3D printing machines that create structures out of adobe now. Huge ones. I see whole niche industries coming from laser cutters and CnC machines. People who started on Arduino boards now build music synthesizers and modular synth components. That movement continues and now offers a wide array of dividends.

miladyincontrol• 5 months ago

It almost felt like a well poisoning those that were preaching towards casual audiences how 3d printing would bring in this era of having a little factory in your garage. A set of machines that'd make anything and everything without any expertise on the user's end, replacing most overseas production.

maxdo• 5 months ago

I feel bad about the author . The entire post is a religious denial of the reality.

It’s obvious with each iteration of llms that vibe code , write-only-code is here to stay in many industries if not everywhere.

micromacrofoot• 5 months ago

I feel like every blog post like this marches up to a point and then abruptly stops before looking at the only thing that has improved working conditions in the US: organized labor movements.

fooker3• 5 months ago

There is no getting around the fact that projects that used to take man-years are possible in an afternoon now.

And this is the worst this technology is ever going to be :)

Don't take my word for it, go try building something that you always wanted to build but did not have time for. If you do not have something like that at the back of your head, I doubt you have to be concerned about this topic.

hollowturtle• 5 months ago

What did you build that would have gotten man years before?

fooker3• 5 months ago

Adobe Illustrator clone that plays well with latex for drawing diagrams in papers.

AbstractH24• 5 months ago

No, it’ll redefine what it means to make

14• 5 months ago

I have not yet tried vibe coding but it is something I look forward to trying when I get some free time (kids growing up a little).

I assume some could use it to make for commercial sale products but when I heard of it I really just pictured it mainly for small personal projects mainly.

I have always had an interest in electronics but without going to college there was really obvious no path to get into creating small diy projects. Then years back came along Raspberry Pi. I bought one along with a big variety of different sensors and a breadboard and all the things one would need to create something. I pictures making things that would email my mom when her plants were getting dry and many other dreams with all the sensors.

But it was still overwhelming. Lots of knowledge you need before you even start so it felt hard. But eventually I set off to try something and with many hours of searching for how to code what I wanted and essentially copying code and maybe slightly altering it to my needs I did finish one project. It was basic but I was always proud of what I accomplished. I had an IR sensor that would detect if someone walked in front of it and when that happened I also had a power relay that was connected to a lamp. When motion detected the lamp would then blink SOS in Morse code and it would also send me an email saying motion detected. What a feeling when I ran it and it worked on the first try.

But that took so much time searching and trying to find the code I wanted. I see vibe coding and imagine I could do the same thing in minutes verses hours. I don't think I will ever make some project that is ever going to make me money but do imagine with vibe coding the barrier to creating some of those projects I dreamed up in my head for personal use is much closer and obtainable.

j45• 5 months ago

If the maker movement is 3d printing this might be an out of touch perspective.

Bambu Labs a month others have made 3d printing far more click and print with little to no tinkering.

burgerquizz• 5 months ago

is there maker movement ever ended? It’s stronger than ever with vibe coding

eggplantiny• 5 months ago

The "consumption" frame is more honest than "craft," agreed. But it falls into the exact same hole. Taste accumulation, attention capture, gift economy, signal fortress—they're all variations of "how do I assetize the byproducts?" The frame changed, but the question didn't: what do I get out of this?

The author already touched on a better answer. Scenius worked because of the "permission to fuck around." Nobody expected your Arduino to ship. But the conclusion hands you four value-capture strategies and quietly revokes that permission. "Play freely, but collect the exhaust" isn't permission—it's a conditional license.

I once learned songwriting from an indie musician who refused autotune and wrote by hand. He said the point of busking isn't playing because there's an audience. It's playing when nobody stops. You play anyway. That's how you find your sound.

This gets at the root of "evaluative anesthesia." It's not that our tools are too powerful. It's that we're asking "is this valuable?" at every step. A busker doesn't ask that. Taste and judgment accumulate as a residue of immersion, not deliberate capture.

What vibe coding needs isn't a smarter consumption strategy. It might just be the courage to play to an empty street.

vicchenai• 5 months ago

The maker movement comparison works on the surface but misses a key asymmetry: 3D printing failed partly because physical atoms still cost money to produce and ship. Code has zero marginal reproduction cost. Every vibe-coded tool that ships becomes infinitely cheap to distribute.

The more interesting question is what vibe coding actually democratizes. It's not engineering---it's implementation. The bottleneck shifts from 'can you write the code' to 'do you understand the domain well enough to specify what the code should do, and verify it's doing that correctly.'

I've watched domain experts---people with deep subject matter knowledge who previously couldn't build because they lacked CS fundamentals---suddenly able to ship working tools. Code quality is often brittle. But the problem understanding is sharp, because they're building something they actually needed.

The maker analogy would have been more accurate if 3D printers only failed when you asked them to print something you didn't fully understand. That's where vibe coding fails too.

peteforde20• 5 months ago

I've got to be honest: my complete skepticism that the maker movement is somehow past tense makes it extremely difficult for me to take this tenuous comparison to LLM coding particularly seriously.

The author talks about lowered barriers to prototyping as though they represent a failure state; that's absurd, and it has absolutely nothing to do with whether most people have membership-based maker spaces nearby.

Meanwhile, we're in a golden era of tool access. It's now possible for people to buy affordable CNCs, laser cutters and UV printers. I have a freaking pick and place in my home.

Also, you can have custom PCBs shipped to you in a week for about $10.

Having LLMs available at the same time as all of these tools are rapidly evolving means that anyone with an idea can prototype just about anything. In my worldview, anyone not excited about this either has no original ideas or a cynical agenda.

I'd say more but I have to get back to work on my maker projects.

andsoitis• 5 months ago

It's now possible for people to buy affordable CNCs, laser cutters and UV printers.

Do a lot of people do it? Maybe the answer is a tentative yes, given news like the recent case about guns and 3D printing.

steve_adams_864• 5 months ago

There are plenty of companies iterating on and selling these products so I assume yes, people are buying them.

peteforde20• 5 months ago

I would put "you can make anything" -> "I will print guns!" strongly in the "no creative ideas" category.

Honestly, it's baffling that anyone would put real effort into printing guns when it seems as though some countries cough make it easy to pick one up at Walmart.

aleph_minus_one11• 5 months ago

Maybe the answer is a tentative yes, given news like the recent case about guns and 3D printing.

In my observation these news lead to maker nerds "prepper-buying" (get such a machine before they become forbidden) quite a lot of such machines recently. :-)

alnwlsn2• 5 months ago

Of the people I know, about 80% of households have a 3D printer. Now, I'm sure I don't know that many people, but that's a lot more 3D printers than they had a decade ago.

fao_4• 5 months ago

I disagree with your framing cynicism as an "agenda". For the record, I agree that the maker movement hasn't actually ended, and most of your points are correct; however, the idea of LLMs teaching Electronics worries me about as much as people using LLMs to learn Chemistry.

A little while ago I had to dissuade someone from learning Chemistry via an LLM, because the advice that they had been given by the LLM would have very literally either blown up the glassware, throwing molten chemicals all over their clothing, or killed them when they tried to taste whatever they were trying to synthesize. There was no consideration of safety protocol, PPE, proper glassware, or correctly dealing with chemical reactions, and nary a mention of a fucking fume hood. NileRed and a few other chemistry youtubers have utterly woeful approaches to laboratory safety (NileRed specifically I have a chip on my shoulder about — I've seen him practice bad lab work on a number of occasions and violate many of the common safety practices from e.g. Vogel's), but even then they do still take precautions! Let it not be forgotten that safety practices are born through bloodshed. Now we have a whole new wave of people who are excited to learn, and that's great, but one stray hallucination will kill them. I'm sure that the LLM will be more than happy to write an "Oh I'm sorry, it's my bad that I forgot to tell you to double glove when handling organic mercury!" but by then it is too late.

The idea of someone learning, say, House DIY from an LLM and then sawing through the joists or rewiring their electronics is utterly terrifying to me, quite frankly. Likewise, the idea of someone following an LLM's instructions and then blowing themselves up in a shower of capacitors or chemical glassware is also utterly terrifying to me.

Yes, you could do all these things before. But at least the most commonly available learning materials to you were trustworthy and written by experts!

peteforde20• 5 months ago

I guess we have to agree to disagree, because I am not particularly interested in chemistry and ChatGPT has been extraordinarily helpful in demystifying electronics. Having 24/7 access to a patient person who can unpack the difference between TTL and CMOS logic or when you'd choose a buffer instead of a Schmitt trigger without belittling you for not already knowing what they know is awesome and not going to get anyone even slightly killed.

heavyset_go2• 5 months ago

The idea of someone learning, say, House DIY from an LLM and then sawing through the joists or rewiring their electronics is utterly terrifying to me, quite frankly.

Can't wait for the load-bearing drywall recommendations coming from LLMs that were trained on years of Groverhaus content.

steve_adams_864• 5 months ago

I'm in the same camp.

I don't love that my career seems to be evaporating and perhaps no one will have a use for me soon, but, LLMs have made making even easier and more fun than ever. My sense of what I can take on has been amplified so much, it feels like a super power. Reverse engineering things used to be intimidating to take on, but now it feels like a couple afternoons of exploring with Claude. Understanding the scope of ideas is way more accessible, and often more constrained than it used to be.

I learn so much more than I used to, I get more done than I used to. I love it.

peteforde20• 5 months ago

Hear, hear!

I am quite tired of skeptics and naysayers telling me that I'm only imagining learning, only imagining finishing projects, only imagining having more time for the fun parts.

bandrami5• 5 months ago

It's now possible for people to buy affordable CNCs, laser cutters and UV printers.

And for the most part they just aren't

peteforde20• 5 months ago

They just aren't affordable or they just aren't buying them?

Either way, I suppose the answer is relative and subjective and Bambu Lab would not agree with you.

alnwlsn2• 5 months ago

The maker movement probably is a failure if you're an economist. Nothing could be worse for the economy than people buying less domestic products in favor making their own stuff, and sending more of their paychecks to China to get more cheap circuit boards, machines, and components.

And of course I'm not going to be setting up a "mini factory", I don't feel like it and I already got the one thing I made that I wanted, which almost certainly would never have been profitable for anyone to make at quantity in the first place. In the unlikely event someone does want one, they can just make their own following the same process as above.

switchbak6• 5 months ago

And the entirety of OSS is hand waved away as an externality, but clearly there's something very powerful about all the sharing of models and knowledge going on that doesn't seem to be captured by traditional economic models (that I'm aware of).

peteforde20• 5 months ago

If this is how an us vs them scenario is being framed, you're making a very strong case for the team I've chosen.

It sounds like you're describing winners and losers, but it's shaky ground when you realize many people simply aren't motivated to think like an economist.

Given the choice between spending my life doing interesting things and accumulating wealth, I'm quite comfortable knowing how I'll look back on things from the end.

BTW: you say "of course you're not going to be setting up a mini factory" to someone who quite literally has a mini factory in their house. I'm on Hacker News to hang out with other people who think that's awesome, not some misaligned economic philosophy.

sarbanharble• 5 months ago

The Maker Movement didn’t die, it evolved. Look at STEAM and assistive technology for examples. The failure in monetization of Tech Shops were heartbreaking, but next-generation manufacturing techniques have changed the concept of a mass-produced “one size fits all” product.

numpad0• 5 months ago

The central promise—that distributed digital fabrication would bring manufacturing back to America, that every city would have micro-factories, that 3D printing would decentralize production—simply didn’t materialize. What happened instead follows a pattern that Joel Spolsky described years ago in his essay on commoditizing your complement: cheap 3D printers and Arduinos made prototyping nearly free, which was genuinely useful. But the deep, compounding knowledge of how to actually manufacture things at scale continued to accumulate in industrial bases like Shenzhen. Prototyping got democratized. The cheap tools commodified one layer of the stack and made the layer beneath it more valuable by comparison.
You can watch something structurally similar happening with vibe coding right now. People are rapidly prototyping tools that threaten to displace entire SaaS business models. But the value generated by all that rapid iteration and prototyping flows upward. It accumulates at the model layer, in the training data, in the infrastructure. The vibe coders themselves risk becoming interchangeable, each one spinning up impressive demos without accumulating durable value of their own. The pattern rhymes: cheap tools democratize one layer, and the layer beneath captures the surplus.

dot dot dot.

ChicagoDave• 5 months ago

I’m not sure a I agree with any of the first few paragraphs.

I’m not remotely thinking about AGI. I dabbled in the maker movement and it just doesn’t compare in the sheer velocity we have with GenAI and mass production of code.

blobbers2• 5 months ago

I agree the central promise of 3D printers was they would get cheaper, better, and more like industrial grade and we would end up with this thing that could build replacement parts for anything in our home.

Instead what we were left with was an endless hunt for 'models', and no companies publishing their specs. Everything had to be done custom, and at best some niche manufacturing for weird side quests like adds ons for OneWheels, or cases for raspberry pis.

The closest thing to practical I have 3D printed is a wedge to better aim my google doorbell. I used to make some beautiful planters. I certainly am not 3D printing a droid, or a dishwasher impeller, or a fan blade for my 30 year old fridge.

So yes, while Claude code is fun, and you can build neat prototypes, it takes a lot of work to build a full product and then maintain it, scale it, deploy it. That takes persistent joy in what you're doing because you're not necessarily claude coding everything.

tapland• 5 months ago

I've had plenty of use for mine, but I wish I had a library of mechanisms that work well that I could put together to build easily.

Learning modelling is a huge time sink, learning to make threaded parts, or anything modular to not have to re-print everything for changes. It's great but the printing is the easy part

blobbers2• 5 months ago

For sure. Have you tried to use AI to build the models themselves yet? I'm curious if it can build mechanical systems well.

dangus• 5 months ago

I totally get the point of the article but the analogy isn’t a good one. It’s got the vibe that it’s written by someone who hasn’t been following the 3D printing/maker scene in a long time, which is more popular than ever.

I realize that the wildest promises of 3D printing and maker stuff like Arduono never came to fruition, but maker spaces have matured greatly. If that is the analogy we are making, that means that vibecoding won’t reach “the masses” necessarily but it will be popular beyond the present audience.

theodpHN• 5 months ago

The Rise and Decline of CB Radio https://sjl.us/2023/11/12/the-rise-and-decline-of-cb-radio/

bitwize• 5 months ago

Vibe coding is pretty much the total opposite of the maker movement. Vibe coding's appeal is in getting something for little or no effort by outsourcing the thinking bits to the cloud. The appeal of the maker movement is in getting something by building it yourself, and because you built it you understand and control how it functions.

If vibe coding ends, it will end because model collapse, diminishing returns, escalating costs as the VC money run out, etc. cause LLMs to fail to deliver the promised capacity to, per Dijkstra, "program if you cannot". There will be a culling as amateurs and dilettantes with no technical knowledge or interest lose interest in programming itself, and the field will collapse back into a niche. Amateurs and dilettantes crashed out early of the maker movement, if they got involved at all; "making" was for technically inclined people in the first place.

atoav• 5 months ago

I run a medialab in an art university. My suggestion is that it will have the opposite effect as I now see students who would have never dared to use code, use it. I have also seen a LLM suggest electrical advice to a student that would have reliably started a fire, but hey.

arisAlexis• 5 months ago

Amazing cope from developers. Understandable I'm one of them. But you need to face reality.

geldedus2• 5 months ago

AI-assisted programming is not "vibe coding". Different things

toddmorrow• 5 months ago

If I wanted a pcb before tariffs, China + shipping << USA + domestic shipping

- I bet that holds true after tariffs. (it does, actually): PCB Cost: $5.00 Shipping:$5.63 Total:$10.63

- I bet that holds true for custom aluminum parts, etc

for some strange reason, shipping and prices from China << shipping within the USA, still, even after tariffs

"Maker nation" might have been 3D printer company hype. Or just the whole US supply chain is full of price gouging

vannevar• 5 months ago

The enormous difference between vibe-coding and 3D printing is that vibe-coding is improving exponentially at a rapid rate, while 3D printing is improving linearly at a slow rate. Very little that we say about vibe-coding today is likely to be valid even six months' from now, whereas a 3D printer sold 5 years from now will probably be very similar to one sold today.

buffaloRider500• 5 months ago

Vibe coding can only replicate code that has already been written so many times that the token patterns are clearly defined in the model. What are people vibe coding that is worth anything? I have seen nothing of value generated by llms

tultras• 5 months ago

I've just gotten into claude code after more than a year resisting it, due to reading that I'd get dumb, lazy and forget how to code.

But the truth is that claude code made programming much more fun to me: I skip the boring parts of writing code and hopping around files and focus on funcionality, architecture and code quality. Software engineering has never been about typing. I don't consider myself a typist (even though I'm very good at it). I'm an architect above all, and using claude code has allowed me to focus on the parts of the job I enjoy the most.

Only to be clear, I treat claude code as a junior developer that needs mentoring. I review every single diff it produces keeping an eye for patterns that go off standards, hardcoded values scattered throught the code, repeated function blocks, adequate tests and so on. I don't plan on leaving it all to claude code, because at the end of the day the one responsible for code in production is going to be me, not claude. But it's been a hell of a ride (not to mention the 30x productivity improvement, literally).

nachocoll• 4 months ago

Great post, and the "dark flow" framing really resonates — the productivity illusion described in the METR study alone should give every engineering team pause.

What strikes me reading this thread is how many of you have independently landed on the same conclusions: human accountability for generated code is non-negotiable, architecture has to drive generation (not the other way around), traceability matters, and you can't maintain what you don't understand.

These aren't just gut feelings — they're actually the core of something a few of us have been trying to formalize: the Agile Vibe Coding Manifesto (https://agilevibecoding.org). It explicitly builds on top of the original Agile Manifesto to address exactly this environment.

The four values it proposes — accountability over anonymous generation, traceable intent over opaque implementation, discoverable domain structure over scattered code, and human-readable documentation over implicit knowledge — map directly to what experienced engineers in this thread are describing: staying deeply in the loop, reading the core code, and defining architectural boundaries before letting AI generate within them.

It doesn't reject AI-assisted coding. It tries to answer: what disciplines do Agile teams need so that AI-generated code doesn't become a liability? Worth a look if this resonates.

Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

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