Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?
read.technically.dev243 points by itunpredictable 7 hours ago
243 points by itunpredictable 7 hours 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.
> 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.
> The higher paid engineers i've worked with are always worth their salary/hourly rate because of the way they approach problems and the solutions they come up with.
I'm honestly just happy at the moment, because our two junior admins/platform engineers have made some really good points to me in preparation for their annual reviews.
One now completed his own bigger terraform project, with the great praise of "That looks super easy to maintain and use" from the other more experienced engineers. He figured: "It's weird, you actually end up thinking and poking at a problem for a week or two, and then it actually folds into a very small amount of code. And sure, Copilot helped a bit with some boilerplate, but that was only after figuring out how to structure and hold it".
The other is working on getting a grip on running the big temperamental beast called PostgreSQL. She was recently a bit frustrated. "How can it be so hard to configure a simple number! It's so easy to set it in ansible and roll it out, but to find the right value, you gotta search the entire universe from top to bottom and then the answer is <maybe>. AAaah I gotta yell at a team". She's on a good way to become a great DBA.
> Agents are great at building out features, i'm not so sure about complex software that grows over time. Unless you know the right questions to ask, the agent misses alot. 80/20 doesn't work for systems that need 100% reliability.
Or if it's very structured and testable. For example, we're seeing great value in rebuilding a Grafana instance from manually managed to scripted dashboards. After a bit of scaffolding, some style instructions and a few example systems, you can just chuck it a description and a few queries, it just goes to successful work and just needs a little tweaking afterwards.
Similar, we're now converting a few remnants of our old config management to the new one using AI agents. Setup a good test suite first, then throw old code and examples of how the new config management does it into the context and modern models do that well. At that point, just rebuilding the system once is better than year-long deprecation plans with undecided stakeholders as mobile as a pet ferret that doesn't want to.
It's really not the code holding the platform together, it's the team and the experiences and behaviors of people.
It makes sense for junior admins and junior platform engineers to leverage LLM's but I'd be highly skeptical for the future skillset of any junior software engineer who leverages LLM's right off the bat, unless we have already moved that goalpost.
Ya, this is the issue. LLMs are not great for developing minds. A lot like the internet presently, to be frank.
For fully developed and experienced minds, both can be useful.
You’re not wrong. You’re not the only one saying this either. Though, I’m currently of the mind that the concern is overblown. I’m finding Opus 4.6 is only really capable of solving a problem when the prompt explains the fix in such concrete detail that coding is incredibly straightforward. For example, if the prompt has enough detail that any decent human programmer would read it and end up writing basically the same code then Claude can probably manage it too.
While I haven’t used other models like Codex and Gemini all that much recently, Anthropic’s is one of the top-tier models, and so I believe the others are probably the same in this way.
A junior’s mind will not rot because the prompt basically has to contain detailed pseudocode in order to get anywhere.
> He figured: "It's weird, you actually end up thinking and poking at a problem for a week or two, and then it actually folds into a very small amount of code. And sure, Copilot helped a bit with some boilerplate, but that was only after figuring out how to structure and hold it".
Let me just get you that Fred Brooks quote, now where was it...? Ah, yes, here's one:
We didn't even have to offshore for lots of bad code to be written.
Looks at the scores of Ycombinator startups that wrote a shitload of awful code and failed. Good ideas, pretty websites, but not a lot of substance under the hood. The VC gathering aspect and online kudos was way more important to them than actually producing good code and a reliable product that would stand the test of time.
Pretty much the most detestable section of the HN community. IMNHSO. I notice they're much quieter than usual since the whole vibe coding thing kicked off.
> Looks at the scores of Ycombinator startups that wrote a shitload of awful code and failed.
This can also be restated as, look at all the startups that wrote a shitload of awful code and succeeded.
That’s an indicator code quality doesn’t matter at macro scales. We already knew this though even if we didn’t explicitly say it. It’s more about organization, coordination, and execution than code.
> That’s an indicator code quality doesn’t matter at macro scales.
I think it can though. It just depends. Having high quality code and making good technical choices can matter in many ways. From improving performance (massively) and correctness, to attracting great talent. Jane Street and WhatsApp come to mind, maybe Discord too. Just like great design will attract great designers.
I also think it might matter even more in the age of AI Agents. Most of my time now is spent reviewing code instead of writing code, and that makes me a huge bottleneck. So the best way to optimize is to make the code more readable and having good automated checks to reduce the amount of work I need to do, like static types, no nulls, compilation, automated tests, secondary agent reviews, etc.
I mean, look at all the startups that succeeded despite being complete shitshows behind the scenes... the baseline for leadership, organization, coordination or, hell, execution for a startup to succeed isn't exactly high either.
They left ages ago, around the time PH got big.
I can't remember the last time I saw a '10 ways to fit 25 hours in 24 hours' type article on here, which were rife 10 years ago.
I think it is a misnomer to attribute startup failure to bad code. There are so many other factors at play that are more powerful.
Not to say the crowd u speak of doesn’t exist, they do.
One thought experiment I keep having when I see LLM hype: imagine if our outsourcing companies could be as blasé about copyright as OpenAI, and how profitable they could be.
I mean, rename some dudes over there to ‘transformer’, and let them copy & paste from GitHub with abandon… I know we could get a whole browser for less than a few grand.
We wouldn’t, because it’d be copyright-insane. But if we just got it indirect enough, maybe fed the info to the copiers through a ‘transforming’ browser to mirror the copyright argument, I bet we could outperform OpenAI in key metrics.
Coding is formalizing for the compiler. The other 99% of the job is softly getting the PHB not to fuck the entire company and being unique in not doing dumb shit everyone thinks is popular now but will regret soon. It’s all like IT tribal tattoos. Barely cool for a couple of years, and then a lifelong source of shielded regret.
I'm surprised you think this hasn't been happening for years, in smaller offshore shops.
> I never heard that
I did, a lot, maybe fifteen years ago. There was a lot of talk about a "3D printing revolution" and being years away from being able to make whatever you want at home. For a while, the "maker" moniker was strongly associated with home manufacturing maximalists.
I still don't get the point the article is making, though. That 3D printer thinking was obviously naive because it underestimated the difficulty of mechanical design and the importance of the economies of scale. Using AI to "write" or "code" is a lot easier than turning a vague idea for a household good into a durable and aesthetic 3D print, so it's apples to oranges.
There are other things that the vibecoding movement is underestimating - when you pay a SaaS vendor, you're usually not paying for code as much as for having a turnkey solution where functionality, security, infrastructure, and user support are someone else's problem. But I think that's pretty much where the parallels end.
Also hiring. It's easier to find people with JIRA experience than people in your vibe-coded ticket manager, even if it is technically superior for your application.
If there is any commonality between the 3D printing craze and vibe-coding, they're both renditions of "just because you can, doesn't mean you should".
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.
What we're seeing instead are companies you can send CAD files to, get estimates, and receive the parts back in a few days.
I think we'll see this slowly march along. I just made some custom-designed speaker tilt mount things for my desk. Sure, it's a trivially simple example, but a lot of things are. I was able to get the exact angle I wanted, bigger than most and in a design I liked, crafted by AI in 5 minutes, and on my desk by the next morning and for a fraction of the price of a Chinese made Amazon version.
It's no replicator, but give it 5 years and it might be surprising how useful it is.
3d printing matured. My makerspacr's 3d printing room is now more busy than it ever been.
But the real magic happens in CAD while printers are good enough that it gets out of your way.
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.
> Then it was a lot of “self replicating printers” for quite a while, which never has been a real thing.
3D-printed 3D printers got quite far; the reason why this topic got out of perception by people who are not 3D printing nerds is rather that for mass production of 3D printers there exist much better processes.
What was realized was that up to a certain amount of parts, 3D printing these parts on a 3D printer works really well. You can find a lot of designs of such 3D printers on the internet.
Concerning the progress here, also observe that over the last years, home 3D printers got a lot better with respect to handling "engineering materials". These materials are very useful if you want to (partly) 3D-print a 3D printer, but this development is often not associated with "3D-printing 3D printers". :-)
Then you get to parts which can be printed on a 3D printer, but these parts will not be of the same quality as parts that can easily be bought, such as belts etc. The Mulbot is a design that takes this approach very far:
> https://github.com/3dprintingworld/Mulbot
> https://www.printables.com/model/5995-mulbot-the-mostly-prin...
And then you get to parts that are nearly impossible to print on a 3D printer ...
So, after there was a consensus where the boundaries lie how much a 3D printer can sensibly be 3D-printed, people started looking at other manufacturing techniques that exist for producing parts of 3D printers, and started considering
1. could and how far could a machine for this process be 3D-printed (or produced on a 3D-printed machine)?
2. could we bring such a machine to home manufacturing, too (so that people can easily build such a machine at home)?
Machines that were considered for this were, for example, CNC mill (3, 4 and 5 axis), CNC lathe, pick and place machines (for producing PCBs), ...
There do exist partial implementations of such machines, just to give some examples:
- lots of designs of CNC mills that use 3D-printed parts. I won't give a list here, but just want to mention that the "Voron Cascade" project wants to do for home 3 axis CNC milling what the Voron did for 3D printing. Rumors on the internet say that the Voron Cascade is well on the way, but had quite a lot of delays with respect to announced release dates.
- an attempt to build a pick and place machine: https://hackaday.io/project/169354-3d-printed-pick-and-place...
Thus: I hope I could give evidence that in the last years there still were a lot of developments towards the far goal of "self-replicating 3D printers", but these developments were rather silent, impressive developments instead of loud, obtrusive marketing stunts.
> or houses
They're not common by any means, but they do exist. Walls look pretty ugly though.
Just like with vibecoding complains, have you tried the latest models (of 3d printers)? Specifically, Bambu's latest models make the printer a device to just use rather than the project itself. It's the Apple of 3d printing. Previously, you'd spend hours on calibrating and leveling nonsense. Latest models don't have this problem. Open the app on your phone, (doom)scroll until you find something, and just hit print from your phone. You can make it more complicated as desired, but it's not necessary to get something out of your printer.
Which apes vibecoding. ChatGPT 3.5 was laughably bad compared to codex 5.3, but if you're basing your opinion on 3.5's performance, your opinion's out of date.
I recently wrote a blog post about exactly this, and I agree with your perspective. Vibe coding helps with showing other people your idea and get them to understand it, try it and, most importantly, help you fail fast. But as the product matures, the gains of using LLM's and agentic engineering will go from 10000% efficiency to something like maybe 30(?)% productivity gain? Which is still awesome, of course.
"The real test of Vibe coding is whether people will finally realize the cost of software development is in the maintenance, not in the creation."
https://blog.oak.ninja/shower-thoughts/2026/02/12/business-i...
It's not awesome, not for us. 30% productivity gain would be enormous. Just imagine 30% of developers losing their jobs, in addition to outsourcing and all the new graduates flooding out of colleges after CS has been hyped so much in the recent years.
I really doubt that 30% productivity gain would result in 30% developers losing their jobs. Believing this would require an assumption that businesses and economies will never grow.
Do you know how many 30% productivity gains I’ve seen over the last 25 years? How many people before me saw in the 25 years before that?
And? Nothing you can do against it.
IT and coding was a good carrier for a long time, but times are changing.
> It's not awesome, not for us.
Depends on where you stand. Maybe leet code won't be a common thing (can be solved with AI), maybe they'll look for different skills, etc.
If losing 30% means hiring the right people for the job you might have better chances. For a long time these were never aligned properly.
There was certainly a contingent who believed that 3d printing was going to replace all other forms of manufacturing. It was even going to make custom food for us on order.
If you balked at the idea, then you were the bad guy, or treated with pity for being so out of touch. Usually you got the Kubler-Ross Stages thrown at you.
> It didn’t seem like 3D-printing ever showed sings of displacing existing ways of manufacturing at scale
No, it never seemed that way to the realists, but it was said to seem that way to the makerspheres.
Definitely a fantasy land ideal. Much like pitches from the Free Software Foundation of a world without copyright and IP. It's just never going to exist because reality just isn't that way.
> Much like pitches from the Free Software Foundation of a world without copyright and IP.
Didn't the big AI vendors kinda bring that to fruition?
> It didn’t seem like 3D-printing ever showed sings of displacing existing ways of manufacturing at scale, did it?
It didn’t and I’m not sure anyone who knew anything about at-scale manufacturing ever saw it that way. Injection molding is far cheaper per unit and more accurate.
But 3D printing has made a major impact on prototyping. Parts that would have taken serious machine shop work or outsourcing can be printed in a few hours. It really changed the game for mechanical engineers.
In terms of vibe coding, time to demo/prototype is greatly reduced. That definitely takes time and cost away from R&D. But I don’t know that it’s had much impact on transfer to manufacturing, which can easily be the hard final 20%.
The people who did best during the gold rush were the people who went out and were lucky enough to find stockpiles of gold.
> Vibe coding, on the other hand, is competing against hand coding, and for many use cases is considerably more efficient. It’s clearly replacing a lot of hand coding.
It seems like a lot of vibe coders are people who otherwise wouldn't be coding at all.
Yeah, it's like saying that the amateur rocketry guys on youtube are going to replace NASA.
Good example! 90 percent ( or even more) of code do not need NASA level code. Vibe coding is good enough.
Just like a five dollar t shirt is enough for many many people
If 90% of code is for hobbies that don't cost anyone anything when it breaks, great - but launching rockets into space with million or billion dollar payloads is akin to software that makes millions or billions of dollars, and vibeslop is simply a liability at best in any real use case past a weekend hobby project.
The vibe coders wish they could produce the equivalent of a $5 teeshirt. Or they think they are because they don't have the ability to tell.
It was promised but it never materialised. Everyone was saying we'd all have a 3D printer at home and there'd be no market for niche products any more because we'd just print them on demand.
I also don't think the "maker movement" disappeared, it's just that the bar for making stuff is so much lower now that anyone and their grandmother can do it.
In the past weeks I:
- 3D printed custom cups that fit onto a pet feeder to prevent ants from getting to our cat food
- 3D printed custom mounts to mount 3W WS2812 LEDs to illuminate Chinese New Year lanterns and connected them to an ESP32 WLED box connected to home assistant
- Connected an vision language model to a security camera that can answer questions about how many times a cat has eaten, drank water, used the toilet, and inform us about any things in the room that look abnormal
- Custom laser cutted a wall fitting for a portable heat pump input and output condenser hoses and added a condensate pump to the contraption, it saves us $200/month in heating costs
- Custom designed a retrofit for a sliding door that accepts a Nuki smart lock that wasn't designed for this type of door.
- Custom laser cutted a valentines day card in Chinese paper cutting style that was generated with many rounds of back and forth prompting with Gemini, then converted to SVG and cut
- My wife and I thought IKEA SKADIS pegboards would look better if they were made out of bamboo plywood, so I shoved a sheet of bamboo into my laser cutter and had it cut out a pegboard that looked much nicer, sprayed it with lacquer, then attached it to the wall with 3D printed mounting hardware. The SVG for the pegboard was generated by a script written by Cursor and took a couple of minutes.
- Having an ESP32 feed a camera image to an LLM and then do something with the result is a piece of cake. A box that "sprays water to deter the cat if the cat jumps on the kitchen counter" is a 1-hour job after you order the components from Amazon, and an LLM will build that parts list for you, too.
A lot of this could have been worth sharing 10 years ago. Now all of this is just "normal life in 2026" so you don't hear about it much. I'm used to thinking of something and then physically having it <12 hours later. It's no longer an undertaking. It's not news anymore.
Correct. Almost nobody talked about “getting manufacturing back to the US”. Almost always it was just people glad they could build things.
Its also interesting how the author frames the results: Shenzhen is now better than it was ever before at manufacturing. The maker culture succeeded!
> Almost nobody talked about “getting manufacturing back to the US”.
I guess the President of the United States is an almost nobody. Obama's 2013 State of the Union hyped up 3-D printing explicitly as a tech that would be bringing manufacturing back to the U.S. The U.S. government made public-private partnerships with maker spaces and fab facilities in hollowed out Rust Belt cities, and Obama mentioned it by name in the most important and viewed policy speech the President gives each year.
> “A once-shuttered warehouse is now a state-of-the art lab where new workers are mastering the 3-D printing that has the potential to revolutionize the way we make almost everything,” Obama said. [...] Obama announced plans for three more manufacturing hubs where businesses will partner with the departments of Defense and Energy “to turn regions left behind by globalization into global centers of high-tech jobs.” (https://edition.cnn.com/2013/02/13/tech/innovation/obama-3d-...)
>Companies will be happy to have a way to press down the budget of a cost center, but the delta won’t make or break that many businesses.
Software companies spend a huge amount of money on having software written. Why would significantly altering the cost structure not make or break companies?
They're spending money on producing software, not lines of code - for now that's a distinction
> BTW, I think a lot of people were/are greatly overestimating the value of coding to business success.
I've frequently argued to my organization's leadership that the product could be open source on GitHub with a flashing neon sign above it and it wouldn't change anything about the business. A competitor stealing our codebase would probably be worse off than if they had done anything else. Conway's law and all that.
One of the odd things people do with tech is taking someone else's random projections at face value?
What does it mean to say "we were promised flying cars", or "every city would have micro-factories, that 3D printing would decentralize production"?
The people creating these narratives may a) truly believe it and tried to make it a reality, but failed b) never believed it at all, but failed anyway, c) or be somewhere else on this quadrant of belief vs actuality.
Why not just treat it as, "a prediction that went wrong". I suppose it's because a narrative of promise feels like a promise, and people don't like being lied to.
It's a strange narrative maneuver we keep doing with tech, which is more future-facing than most fields.
Well, there's also the almost never mentioned Rock's Law:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_second_law
We do have flying cars, and we do have printers that print other printers, but both were some combination of really expensive/poor quality. Technically speaking, if you take it that most cities have 3D printers, most cities then do have micro factories, however that says nothing about general feasability...
Technology requires infrastructure and resources, and our infrastructure is strained and our resources are even more so... Until the costs become pocket change for the average person, technology will just remain generally unavailable.
> What does it mean to say "we were promised flying cars"...
I don't know about the other things you mentioned, but I think you have this in the wrong category. "We were promised flying cars" is one half of a construction contrasting utopian promises/hype with dystopian (or at lest underwhelming) outcomes. I think the most common version is:
> They promised us flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.
Translation: tech promised awesome things that would make our life better, but instead we actually got was stuff like the toxicity of social media.
IMHO, this insight is one of the reasons there's so much negativity around AI. People have been around the block enough to have good reason to question tech hype, and they're expecting the next thing to turn out as badly as social media did.
> 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.
3D printing is giving my company many benefits over injection molding. We have 6 variations of the case for our device and we're always coming up with improvements and new functionality, and new products. I only see us expanding our in-house resin print farm instead of building out injection molds. No, we aren't selling millions of units, but injection molding is just too expensive for anything but a 1-size-fits-all solution.
> It didn’t seem like 3D-printing ever showed sings of displacing existing ways of manufacturing at scale, did it?
It's really hard to beat injection molding for scale.
However, what 3D printing did shift was building molds and prototypes. And that shifted small volume manufacturing--one offs and small volumes are now practical that didn't used to be. In addition, you can iterate more easily over multiple versions.
The limiting factor, however, has always been the brain power designing the thing. YouTube is littered with videos that someone wants to build a "thing" and then spends 10-20 iterations figuring out everything they didn't know going into the project. This is no different from "real" projects, but your experienced engineering staff probably only take 5 iterations instead of 20.
> I never heard that. It didn’t seem like 3D-printing ever showed sings of displacing existing ways of manufacturing at scale, did it? Units per hour and dollars per unit was never its strength. It was always going to be small things (and if anything big grew out of it, those would naturally transition to the more efficient manufacturing at scale).
There were articles posted on HN hyping exactly that, with comments debating whether 3D-printing would eventually replace conventional manufacturing at scale, and how people would no longer shop at stores like Walmart for their cheap products.
> As always, the people selling pick-axes during the gold rush will probably do the best.
it's the people that sell the pickaxe pickaxes.
> I never heard that.
Once the predictions of a magical future turn out to be false, techies suddenly don't remember. Kind of like when the cult leader's prediction of doomsday doesn't show, there's always another magical prediction of a new future coming. Here are just a few major mainstream sources:
2012, Cornell Prof and Lab Director, in CNN: "We really want to print a robot that will walk out of a printer. We have been able to print batteries and motors, but we haven’t been able to print the whole thing yet. I think in two or three years we’ll be able to do that." (https://www.cnn.com/2012/07/20/tech/3d-printing-manufacturin...)
2013, World Economic Forum: "the world can be altered further if home-based 3D printing becomes the norm. In this world, every home is equipped with a printer capable of making most of the products it needs. Supply chains that support the flow of products and parts to consumers will vanish, to be replaced by supply chains of raw material." (https://www.weforum.org/stories/2013/08/will-3d-printing-kil...)
2013, President of the United States of America Barack Obama hypes up 3-D printing in the State of the Union as a technology that will bring manufacturing back to the U.S.: “A once-shuttered warehouse is now a state-of-the art lab where new workers are mastering the 3-D printing that has the potential to revolutionize the way we make almost everything..." Obama announced plans for three more manufacturing hubs where businesses will partner with the departments of Defense and Energy “to turn regions left behind by globalization into global centers of high-tech jobs.” (https://edition.cnn.com/2013/02/13/tech/innovation/obama-3d-...)
2012, Cover story and special issue of The Economist predicting another Nth industrial revolution:
"THE first industrial revolution began in Britain in the late 18th century, with the mechanisation of the textile industry. Tasks previously done laboriously by hand in hundreds of weavers’ cottages were brought together in a single cotton mill, and the factory was born. The second industrial revolution came in the early 20th century, when Henry Ford mastered the moving assembly line and ushered in the age of mass production. The first two industrial revolutions made people richer and more urban. Now a third revolution is under way. Manufacturing is going digital. As this week’s special report argues, this could change not just business, but much else besides.
A number of remarkable technologies are converging: clever software, novel materials, more dexterous robots, new processes (notably three-dimensional printing) and a whole range of web-based services. The factory of the past was based on cranking out zillions of identical products: Ford famously said that car-buyers could have any colour they liked, as long as it was black. But the cost of producing much smaller batches of a wider variety, with each product tailored precisely to each customer’s whims, is falling. The factory of the future will focus on mass customisation—and may look more like those weavers’ cottages than Ford’s assembly line." (archive: https://communicateasia.wordpress.com/2012/04/20/manufacturi...)
At some scales, Obama was right... a lot of companies that do plastic extruded parts also do 3D printing for lower volume fulfillment. You can also do some types of parts that you couldn't make through extrusion.
It's especially funny because HN commenters are some of the most likely people to make wild, sweeping claims then once they don't come true, turn back around and say "well no one was actually saying that anyway."
Or I just realized that if they are a 22 year old college graduate, they were in elementary school when the 2012-2014 3-D printing hype cycle was at its peak.
> BTW, I think a lot of people were/are greatly overestimating the value of coding to business success.
I think I have a conversation at least weekly where I have to explain to someone that using an LLM to convert COBOL to Java (or whatever) will not actually save much effort. I don’t know how many ways to explain that translating the literal instructions from one language to another is not actually is not that hard for someone fluent in both and the actual bottleneck is in understanding what sort of business logic the COBOL has embedded in it and all the foundational rearchitecting that will involve.
The people selling vibe code pick-axes are buying them for 50 dollars and selling them for 20. Not sure if they will do the best
> BTW, I think a lot of people were/are greatly overestimating the value of coding to business success.
Uh, no they're not. Did you not see the recent announcement from unity. One short prompt and you get a whole AAA+ game in one shot.
/s
vibe coding is only "more efficient" if you ignore the massive energy costs involved
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.
> 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…
You're absolutely right -- that's the crux of the problem. There are no shortcuts, only future liabilities.
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.
> It's hard to tell any more.
Wait, I think I have the answer!
"You're in a desert, walking along in the sand when all of a sudden you look down and see a tortoise. It's crawling toward you. You reach down and flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over. But it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping. Why is that?"
Hm... Why? Ah! Because you are also a tortoise
Tortoise have been observed righting other tortoise that have become stuck. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/DZ57D608fiM (two tortoises helping a third) this has a terrible voiceover but you get the idea
> You're absolutely right
Bot detected
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. :(
Of course they'll learn. LLM bots have been spotted on HN using that hipster all lower case style of writing.
i can write like this if i want. or if i were a clever ai bot.
Never admit when someone else is right. They'll forget they were right and begin to think they won a fight.
Or something. You're right.
I think that's the joke.
I found the key insight -- when a human tries to sound like an LLM, that's perceived by other humans as humor.
Couldn't one rebut that Arduino is plug-and-play without getting your hands dirty in lower-level electronics?
The article addresses this by making the point that prototypes != production. Arduino is great for prototyping (authors opinion; I have limited experience) but not for production-level manufacturing.
LLMs are effectively (from this article's pov) the "Arduino of coding" but due to their nature, are being misunderstood/misrepresented as production-grade code printers when really they're just glorified MVP factories.
They don't have to be used this way (I use LLMs daily to generate a ton of code, but I do it as a guided, not autonomous process which yields wildly different results than a "vibed" approach), but they are because that's the extent of most people's ability (or desire) to understand them/their role/their future beyond the consensus and hype.
I think even calling them MVP factories is a bit much. They're demo factories. Minimum Viable Products shouldn't have glaring security vulnerabilities and blatant inefficiency, they just might me missing nice-to-have features.
Not, because it isn’t. A plug and play arduino is useless without some level of circuit building expertise.
I might be tilting at a strawman of your definition of vibe coding - apologies in advance if so.
But LLM-aided development is helping me get my hands dirty.
Last weekend, I encountered a bug in my Minecraft server. I run a small modded server for my kids and I to play on, and a contraption I was designing was doing something odd.
I pulled down the mod's codebase, the fabric-api codebase (one of the big modding APIs), and within an hour or so, I had diagnosed the bug and fixed it. Claude was essential in making this possible. Could I have potentially found the bug myself and fixed it? Almost certainly. Would I have bothered? Of course not. I'd have stuck a hopper between the mod block and the chest and just hacked it, and kept playing.
But, in the process of making this fix, and submitting the PR to fabric, I learned things that might make the next diagnosis or tweak that much easier.
Of course it took human judgment to find the bug, characterize it, test it in-game. And look! My first commit (basically fully written by Claude) took the wrong approach! [1]
Through the review process I learned that calling `toStack` wasn't the right approach, and that we should just add a `getMaxStackSize` to `ItemVariantImpl`. I got to read more of the codebase, I took the feedback on board, made a better commit (again, with Claude), and got the PR approved. [2]
They just merged the commit yesterday. Code that I wrote (or asked to have written, if we want to be picky) will end up on thousands of machines. Users will not encounter this issue. The Fabric team got a free bugfix. I learned things.
Now, again - is this a strawman of your point? Probably a little. It's not "vibe coding going straight to production." Review and discernment intervened to polish the commit, expertise of the Fabric devs was needed. Sending the original commit straight to "production" would have been less than ideal. (arguably better than leaving the bug unfixed, though!)
But having an LLM help doesn't have to mean that less understanding and instinct is built up. For this case, and for many other small things I've done, it just removed friction and schlep work that would otherwise have kept me from doing something useful.
This is, in my opinion, a very good thing!
[1]: https://github.com/FabricMC/fabric-api/pull/5220/changes/3e3...
[2]: https://github.com/FabricMC/fabric-api/pull/5220/changes
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.
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!!!
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.
It didn't end, it just failed to commercialize, which IMO is a better outcome anyway. Many more communities today have something akin to a maker space than before the movement. It succeeded to a point that it became mundane.
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.
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.
I saw that happen in a decent sized college town near where I live. They had a maker space spring up when 3D printing was the hottest thing. It didn't last very long though. I'm a bit surprised that 3D printer machines haven't become cheaper. Like solid machines sub-$100. 3D printer pens are the only thing that came close to doing that.
They're already very cheap, almost free when you buy used. I got one for $50 that makes pretty good prints. For $300 you can buy an Elegoo Centauri Carbon that is a really high end consumer printer. Don't forget that we're talking about CNC machine tools with precision movements here. An entry level manual milling machine from Precision Matthews in Taiwan will cost you $250 shipping alone. Even good linear rails by themselves are more than $300 on ebay. A lot of innovation has been happening in the 3D printer space to make all these machine components cheaper which has also benefited other applications like hobbyist milling.
Nowadays, we are so used to all the injection molded plastic crap, and also so much poorer, that we can't understand why precisely manufactured products made from solid metal or wood are so expensive.
> Like solid machines sub-$100.
You can get 3D printers from BestBuy(!) for $200 retail. At that point, the cost of the filament is going to quickly exceed the cost of the machine.
At the $200 price point, your Bill of Materials is roughly $65 (about 1/3 of the retail cost). I challenge you to buy the raw materials of a 3D printer for under $100 let alone $65.
I think its the Ender that goes as low as $170 or so, which isn't terrible.
For sure the prices aren't terrible. But I figured they would get cheaper still.
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.
> Did the maker movement end? I dont think so
Bump.
Because we had our first high profile murder using a 3d printed weapon just last year.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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!
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.]
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.
are you sure that AI generated code will be more vulnerable than a median software engineer? Why?
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.
It's always a year® away. The amazing AI capability is "just around the corner"©. It will replace jobs soon™.
How much longer do we have to put up with people saying this? It's been four years now.
The things that people were saying were a year away a year or two ago are now here.
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.
And yet it's never "now". The promised results are never here.
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.