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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?

#21
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.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#22
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#23
post #3

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.

"Laundering". It's running the source through an LLM to escape the license.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#25

TL;DR 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.

For what purpose exactly?

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.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#26

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.

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.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#27
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.

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.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#28
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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 :)

I feel like a decent AI model would at least ask if you’d considered adding a login and password to your redis or mongodb instance.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#29
post #24

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.

updated the title of the linked article instead :)

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#30
post #17

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 bui…

Appreciate this re: maker movement perhaps being too aesthetically oriented and hence missing out on perhaps the real scenius
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