Why would it? I have a 3d printer and a laser cutter because i want to make things that few other people want.
If at all it will make me do more little hyper specific projects.
Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?
181–190 of 459 posts
Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?
#182Vibe coding isn't so much a movement as a big fat tool that was air dropped from space after the megacorps decided to dump billions of dollars into LLMs and LLM companies. It's like comparing Christianity to water wheels or gay pride to to the Saturn V rocket. It's just not really analogous in any way. I do agree with the author about commoditization, however. The most likely outcome is that software will be commodit…
plugging Osh Park as a non overseas PCB alternative (no affiliation) [0] https://oshpark.com/
I'm aware of osh park, but it's immediately apparent how they are not cost competitive to China, and that this is a structural issue
Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
> 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.
Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?
#184No. AI assisted coding ("vibe coding") will not go away, but the hype around it will as it becomes incorporated into development like any other tool. You'll be expected to use it at work (for "productivity" reasons), but if you enjoy the act of coding and problem solving, you still won't have to for personal projects.
Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?
#185Earlier 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.
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?
Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?
#186Sorry guys, but The big rollback is coming.
Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?
#187There was also something subtle that happened, and it seemed to happen quite rapidly, a little over a decade ago. "Maker" started being used to mean more than just 3D printing hackers and started to refer to engineers, and then others "making" things.. but the watering down wasn't the end of it, it became a way to praise a certain class of employee. The resentment that generated (say, sales, marketing, etc) and the bizarre uses of "Maker", I believe contributed to it's demise.
Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?
#188Vibe coding isn't so much a movement as a big fat tool that was air dropped from space after the megacorps decided to dump billions of dollars into LLMs and LLM companies. It's like comparing Christianity to water wheels or gay pride to to the Saturn V rocket. It's just not really analogous in any way. I do agree with the author about commoditization, however. The most likely outcome is that software will be commodit…
Circuit design has been on the cusp of being automated ever since there were computers. It's been over twenty years of autolayout tools and they're still not very good. Maybe you could research how to make your own PCBs? It can be done at home with a little equipment and then you can offer it as a service to others.
The thing is, the cost of making them at home is both laborious, poorly reproducible, and lower quality than getting it done at JLPCB. In the old days, it was done with an exacto and rubylith. Today it requires a laser setup for about $4000 and you still need to manually apply and remove a resin layer. It's mostly not worth it to do things this way, and you lose the ability to have more than 2 layers in your board.
The bigger issue with PCBs is that even with a nice prototype, actual manufacturing needs to be done in Shenzen for any sort of cost competitiveness if you want to step outside of the hobby realm (just as the author of this essay stated).
It's really, really hard to see where the USA stands in the value chain any more once LLMs have been deployed. If all the physical manufacturing lives in China, where the manufacturing supply chain also lives, and Chinese AI companies can very very easily distill US LLM models, the two remaining US advantages is actually just the dollar's role as reserve currency --- something that crypto bros and the US president is working on eroding at a record pace, and the fact that this overvalued dollar gets all the smart people in China and India to emigrate to the US -- also becoming politically less viable.
Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 det…
> 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.
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.
Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
>The promised results are never here.
Today I fed to Opus 4.6 five screenshots with annotations from the client and told it to implement the changes. Then told it to generate real specs, which it did. I never even looked at the screenshots, I just checked and tested against the generated specs. Client was happy.
I don't know what it means.