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Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

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Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#241
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.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#242
post #74

I don't know about anyone else, but since vibe coding, I'm making more things than I've ever made before. Just a constant stream of making, all day. Couldn't be happier. I make things because I want to see them exist, not because it was hard.

And I make visualizations by watching TV every day. My visual cortex just has a constant stream of making visualizations all day. All these maker types dropping that differentiator immediately in the name of pragmatism.

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

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#243
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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/hou…

> 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 lo…

> 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:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4560756

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#244
post #64

> 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…

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

In the past weeks I:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A lot of this could have been worth sharing 10 years ago. Now all of this is just "normal life in 2026" so you don't hear about it much. I'm used to thinking of something and then physically having it The bar for "news-worthiness" for makers these days? This guy built an entire city for his cats, with a full functional subway system and everything ...

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

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#245
post #174
post #74

I don't know about anyone else, but since vibe coding, I'm making more things than I've ever made before. Just a constant stream of making, all day. Couldn't be happier. I make things because I want to see them exist, not because it was hard.

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

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

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#246

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…

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!!!

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#248
post #6

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

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 purpo…

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

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

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

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#250

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…

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!!!

I'm right there with you!
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