> 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.
> 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.
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."
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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…
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.
But crucially they used "--" and not "—" which means they're safe. Unless it's learning. I may still be peeved that my beloved em dash has been tainted. :(
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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)
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.
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. Wait a year, and we can see the author write once again as if this phase did not exist.
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.
The failure mode split nobody's naming: Claude gets regexes right about 95% of the time, which is annoying but catchable. Gets auth logic or state management right 95% of the time and you've got silent data corruption showing up 3 months later on an edge case nobody tested.
Vibe coders treating those as the same category is what actually worries me. Even in regular software there's a feedback mechanism - unit tests go red, CI breaks. Vibe coding skips that too. You get working code that passes the happy path and nothing that tells you which 5% failure rate is the dangerous one. That judgment about problem category severity is the thing that's hard to develop without breaking things first.
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.
> 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.
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.
The maker movement comparison cuts both ways. What killed most Arduino projects wasn't skill gaps -- it was the cost of production at scale. The LED blinks fine; shipping 10k units breaks you. That constraint forced real learning.
Vibe coding skips that floor entirely. Software "just works" until it doesn't, and the failure mode is invisible until it's customer-facing. Hardware at least tells you when something is wrong because it sparks or stops blinking.
That said: the maker movement didn't die. It got serious -- RISC-V, open silicon, edge inference. The people who started with Arduinos are now doing real work.
My bet is vibe coding has the same trajectory. The floor failure will just be more catastrophic when it comes, because software doesn't spark.
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?
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
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.
> 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".
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'd take vibecoded iot code any day vs the typical hot mess of poorly written code by non-experts following online tutorials and the casual stackoverflow copy-paste :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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...
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.
They're not common by any means, but they do exist. Walls look pretty ugly though.
No, it never seemed that way to the realists, but it was said to seem that way to the makerspheres.
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.
it's the people that sell the pickaxe pickaxes.
The crux of the problem. The only way to truly know is to get your hands dirty. There are no shortcuts, only future liabilities.
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…
Bot detected
i can write like this if i want. or if i were a clever ai bot.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
[Edit: no need for the downvote, folks, it was an honest question although it seemed otherwise. I think the answers below make sense.]
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.
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.
How much longer do we have to put up with people saying this? It's been four years now.
The things I am saying are now a year away, are not the things people were saying were a year away two years ago.
And you're going to have to put up with it forever, because "a year in the future" has always and will always be a year away.
I understand one of the chief innovations the AI industry produces is rhetoric and hype, but it's insufferable and repetitive.
A better AI isn't good enough. "Closer" to a stated goal isn't good enough.
Deliver results that have value to more than just enthusiasts and academics.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
And mastering a technology has lost its point.
Vibe coders treating those as the same category is what actually worries me. Even in regular software there's a feedback mechanism - unit tests go red, CI breaks. Vibe coding skips that too. You get working code that passes the happy path and nothing that tells you which 5% failure rate is the dangerous one. That judgment about problem category severity is the thing that's hard to develop without breaking things first.
AFAIK Replit and Claude code has way to reduce the rate of these kind of errors, but I havn’t deep dived into how.
I mean this happens in normal development?
Couldn't be happier. I make things because I want to see them exist, not because it was hard.
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.
> 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.
Vibe coding skips that floor entirely. Software "just works" until it doesn't, and the failure mode is invisible until it's customer-facing. Hardware at least tells you when something is wrong because it sparks or stops blinking.
That said: the maker movement didn't die. It got serious -- RISC-V, open silicon, edge inference. The people who started with Arduinos are now doing real work.
My bet is vibe coding has the same trajectory. The floor failure will just be more catastrophic when it comes, because software doesn't spark.
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
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.
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".
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
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.
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.
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.
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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.
You should consider trying to using AI in a programming language that scores high in the AutoCoderBenchmark.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.