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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?

#171

Post by eleventyseven »

Freedom2 wrote: post #155
eleventyseven wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 hav…

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.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#172

Post by naravara »

jmull wrote: 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…

> 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.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#173

Post by re-thc »

inigyou wrote: post #158
mattmanser wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's PH?

Product Hunt (I assume)

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#174

Post by boznz »

stavros wrote: 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 to work with more complicated stuff.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#175

Post by re-thc »

tsss wrote: post #148
OakNinja wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rea…

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.

> 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.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#177

Post by smileysteve »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #83

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.

> 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.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#178

Post by bsder »

jmull wrote: 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…

> 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.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#179

Post by Exoristos »

bonesss wrote: post #143
ramathornn wrote: post #82

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…

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 indirec…

I'm surprised you think this hasn't been happening for years, in smaller offshore shops.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#180

Post by switchbak »

Conscat wrote: post #68
jmull wrote: 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 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.

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.

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