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Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

• itunpredictable 7mo ago
  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 7mo 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 7mo 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.]
      • margalabargala 7mo ago
        The novelty of "new thing! That would have been incredibly hard a decade ago!" hasn't worn off yet. This isn't the first time something like this has happened. I would imagine that people had similar thoughts about the first photographs, when previously the only way to capture an image of something was via painting or woodcutting.
        • jjmarr 7mo ago
          When movies first came out they would film random stuff because it was cool to see a train moving directly at you. The novelty didn't wear off for years.
          • margalabargala 7mo ago
            There was something someone said in a comment here, years and years ago (pre AI), which has stuck with me. Paraphrased, "There's basically no business in the Western world that wouldn't come out ahead with a competent software engineer working for $15 an hour". Once agents, or now claws I guess, get another year of development under them they will be everywhere. People will have the novelty of "make me a website. Make it look like this. Make it so the customer gets notifications based on X Y and Z. Use my security cam footage to track the customer's object to give them status updates." And so on. AI may or may not push the frontier of knowledge, TBD, but what it will absolutely do is pull up the baseline floor for everybody to a higher level of technical implementation.
            • tcoff91 7mo ago
              And the explosion in software produced with AI by lay-people will mean that those with offensive security skills, who can crack and exploit software systems, will have incredible power over others.
              • jpadkins 7mo ago
                are you sure that AI generated code will be more vulnerable than a median software engineer? Why?
                • wolpoli 7mo ago
                  I believe the security vulnerability issues will be addressed with companies using cloud based vibe-code platform or a ai security auditor agent that runs through the code base and flags security issues.
                • tcoff91 7mo ago
                  I think that when a software system is used by more people and has more eyes on it, it's more likely to have its security flaws be found and fixed. Then all the users will benefit from the fix. The more that software is fragmented into bespoke applications used by small numbers of people, the less people benefit from security network effects.
      • mghackerlady 7mo ago
        I have a similar feeling to people who upload their AI art to sites like danbooru. Like I guess I can understand making it for yourself but why do you think others want to see it
      • lm28469 7mo ago
        Because these people aren't excited about the actual building part, they crave the attention, the github stars, the views, &c. It's painfully obvious
      • em-bee 7mo ago
        xkcd turned stick figure drawings into an art form. sometimes it is not about how something was created, but about the story being told. some people build apps to solve a problem. why should they not share how they solved that problem? i have written a blog post about a one line command that solves an interesting problem for me. for any experienced sysadmin that's just like a finger painting. do we really need to argue if i should have written that post or not?
    • wasmainiac 7mo 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.
    • epiccoleman 7mo 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLvOLjHt4S0
      • bigfishrunning 7mo ago
        I win. 1 to nothing!
  • lanfeust6 7mo 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.
  • LastTrain 7mo 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.
    • Apocryphon 7mo ago
      Not to mention they're probably thinking of motivations more along the lines of "brand-burnishing."
    • jajuuka 7mo ago
      Vice signaling.
    • AntiDyatlov 7mo ago
      It's not virtous to make a show of one's virtue, virtue signaling is a baplutely a real thing, and a defect.
      • LastTrain 7mo ago
        Sure, you are correct, but most times the accusation is a bullshit rhetorical move to not have to deal with an ugly truth.
    • Petersipoi 7mo ago
      I hope the irony of your comment isn't lost on you
      • LastTrain 7mo ago
        I mean I guess, but you and I are not going to see eye to eye on so-called "virtue signaling" so it isn't the burn you think it is. Virtue signaling is just a fancy term for shaming, right? Shaming serves society by moderating behavior that is unethical or immoral but not illegal. It serves a real purpose to keep us from sliding into a world where we act on our base instincts. Sure people can be a dick about it and be smug and superior, but it is really easy to roll your eyes and move on instead of getting triggered by it.
  • whazor 7mo 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 7mo 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.
  • hrmtst93837 7mo ago
    [flagged]
• htlark 7mo 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 7mo ago
    "Laundering". It's running the source through an LLM to escape the license.
• aforwardslash 7mo 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 7mo 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.
    • aforwardslash 7mo 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.
      • KaiserPro 7mo ago
        RMT has a module in micropython. if youre using a pico, you can use PIO to have a bit more power. (I use it to control stepper motors with a smooth accel/decel ramp. Its doable with RMT, but not as easy.
        • aforwardslash 7mo ago
          Sure, and if it didn't is not complicated to add a new module. Thing is, the module does not support DMA. So, for the specific use case I gave, its not a good fit.
  • roxolotl 7mo ago
• fhub 7mo 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.
  • Mars008 7mo ago
    If anything it was just boosted with introduction of cheap 3d printers.
    • busterarm 7mo ago
      And recent rapid improvement in the technology its availability...
      • Mars008 7mo ago
        And filaments. Different sorts and getting cheaper. Just got into printing. Today a lot can be done withing $1000. That's including printer.
  • throwway120385 7mo 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.
    • dd8601fn 7mo 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.
• franciscator 7mo ago
  If you're vibecoding the start of the singularity... then may be yes.
• saberience 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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.
      • fzeroracer 7mo ago
        This is what I think a lot of the people who advocate for 'AI generated images being art' don't get. There's no effort or intentionality into what's being created; it has the look and appearance of 'polished art' (that breaks down when you look closer) but behind it is nothing. It's also why AI generated code is a nightmare to read and deal with, because the intention behind the code does not exist. Code outputting malformed input because it was a requirement two years ago, a developer throwing in a quick hack to fix a problem, these are things you can divine and figure out from everything else.
• danesparza 7mo ago
  Wait - the maker movement ended?
• redwood 7mo 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 7mo ago
    Appreciate this re: maker movement perhaps being too aesthetically oriented and hence missing out on perhaps the real scenius
• axegon_ 7mo 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 7mo 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.
  • itunpredictable 7mo ago
    updated the title of the linked article instead :)
  • deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
• a1o 7mo 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 7mo 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.
• rglover 7mo 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 7mo ago
    You're absolutely right -- that's the crux of the problem. There are no shortcuts, only future liabilities.
    • james2doyle 7mo ago
      > You're absolutely right Bot detected
      • the_af 7mo ago
        I think that's the joke.
        • names_are_hard 7mo ago
          I found the key insight -- when a human tries to sound like an LLM, that's perceived by other humans as humor.
          • groestl 7mo ago
            Not sarcasm. Not cynism. Just pure humor.
            • johnisgood 7mo ago
              Oh my God, this is peak GPT.
• clawbertct 7mo ago
  [dead]
• zer00eyz 7mo 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/ 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".
• aplomb1026 7mo ago
  [flagged]
• vicchenai 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  • ilikehurdles 7mo ago
    The irony of this ai generated comment replying in defense of ai coding on hackernews. This entire vicchenai account has used llms to generate its entire comment history. What is the benefit to the owner of the account? What do they get out of this?
    • lich_king 7mo ago
      It's all this account posts. I don't think the LLM behind it will understand the irony.
      • ilikehurdles 7mo ago
        Sorry I shadow edited while you were replying. Restating my question - What is the benefit to the owner of the account? What do they get out of this?
• jmull 7mo 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 7mo 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.
    • dd8601fn 7mo 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.
• ge96 7mo 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
• jamiecode 7mo ago
  [dead]
  • jlundberg 7mo ago
    This is an intresting take and the ”tooling” around pure llm-based code generation is what really matters. AFAIK Replit and Claude code has way to reduce the rate of these kind of errors, but I havn’t deep dived into how.
  • dnautics 7mo ago
    > you've got silent data corruption showing up 3 months later on an edge case nobody tested I mean this happens in normal development?
  • teaearlgraycold 7mo ago
    A fault in a regex could be really bad news depending on where it’s used.
• stavros 7mo 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.
  • teaearlgraycold 7mo 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.
    • stavros 7mo 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.
  • boznz 7mo 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 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.
    • stavros 7mo ago
      Oh man, I have that exact same CD player! That project is great, well done.
      • boznz 7mo ago
        Thanks, just browsed to your blog, I did some board designs a few years back for another guy with a horticulture business, that little ESP clock project you just did would have been ideal back then. Amazing the tech you can get for a few dollars these days.
• waffletower 7mo 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.
• giancarlostoro 7mo 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.
  • KaiserPro 7mo 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 7mo 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.
    • giancarlostoro 7mo 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.
      • giraffe_lady 7mo ago
        I'm a member of a local maker space that has been around a while and it has changed so much over the years in response to what people are asking for and what gets used. I don't know if it's a local trend or what but the last 5-7 years the most in demand thing by far are sewing machines, knitting machines, and sergers. They ended up completely scrapping the woodworking area to fit a digital jacquard loom and that thing is booked around the clock, you have to plan 4-5 weeks in advance to get a session. Jeweler's bench is similarly busy. In contrast the soldering and electronics workstations get regular use but I can usually just walk in and get a spot without scheduling or waiting much, which is almost never the case with the fabric stuff.
• Aurornis 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo ago
  I said this with a lot less words recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47105372 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47105372
• dubeye 7mo 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 7mo 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
• throwaway613746 7mo ago
  [dead]
• yieldcrv 7mo 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 7mo ago
  > Will vibe coding end like the maker movement? No, because too much money has been pumped into it.
• janalsncm 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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.
• 0xbadcafebee 7mo 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.
  • inigyou 7mo 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?
    • 0xbadcafebee 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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.
  • geldedus 7mo ago
    when i see an article that still mistakes AI-assisted programming with vibe coding , hard skip for me
• LarsDu88 7mo 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.
  • inigyou 7mo 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.
    • LarsDu88 7mo 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.
• kseniamorph 7mo 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 7mo ago
  Maker movement was a great success, but in China, not in the US.
• niemandhier 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo ago
  Sorry guys, but The big rollback is coming.
• transitorykris 7mo 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 7mo ago
  TIL the Maker movement died I guess?
  • drivers99 7mo 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).
• pm90 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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.
    • asdff 7mo 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.
• keybored 7mo ago
  > Specifically: consumption of a surplus intelligence. Lots of powerplants to fuel the surplus.
• nicetryguy 7mo 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 7mo 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!!!
    • nicetryguy 7mo ago
      I'm right there with you!
    • incognito124 7mo 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 7mo ago
      LLMs are the age of the builder in the same way that Uber eats is the age of the home cook.
• eibrahim 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo ago
  No, shoosh.
• tracerbulletx 7mo ago
  Scaling manufacturing is pretty different from scaling software.
• hi_hi 7mo 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/ 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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.
• fooker 7mo 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 7mo ago
    What did you build that would have gotten man years before?
    • fooker 7mo ago
      Adobe Illustrator clone that plays well with latex for drawing diagrams in papers.
      • AstroBen 7mo ago
        That's awesome! You could probably put Adobe out of business if you charge 10% their price. If you did Illustrator in an afternoon it should only take a week or two for the whole product line?
        • fooker 7mo ago
          No, that's not how it works. It implements the (pretty large) subset of the tool I personally need. But everyone needs a different subset, and maintaining a coherent codebase that supports everyone's need is difficult. What could put Adobe and others out of business is everyone reaching for Claude code, cursor or codex the next time they need complex software tailored to their use case instead of the one size fits all software that is commercially available.
• aplomb1026 7mo ago
  [flagged]
• AbstractH24 7mo ago
  No, it’ll redefine what it means to make
• 14 7mo 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 7mo 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.
• deleted 7mo ago
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• burgerquizz 7mo ago
  is there maker movement ever ended? It’s stronger than ever with vibe coding
• eggplantiny 7mo 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 7mo 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.
• peteforde 7mo 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 7mo 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_86 7mo ago
      There are plenty of companies iterating on and selling these products so I assume yes, people are buying them.
    • peteforde 7mo 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.
      • deleted 7mo ago
        [deleted]
      • 7mo ago
• sarbanharble 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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.
• deleted 7mo ago
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• blobbers 7mo 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 7mo 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
    • blobbers 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo ago
  The Rise and Decline of CB Radio https://sjl.us/2023/11/12/the-rise-and-decline-of-cb-radio/ https://sjl.us/2023/11/12/the-rise-and-decline-of-cb-radio/
• bitwize 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo ago
  Amazing cope from developers. Understandable I'm one of them. But you need to face reality.
• geldedus 7mo ago
  AI-assisted programming is not "vibe coding". Different things
• toddmorrow 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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
• tomik99 7mo ago
  [dead]
• tultras 7mo 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).
• chadtd1 7mo ago
  [flagged]
• nachocoll 7mo 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 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.