> You’re left reaching inward for something that the process never required you to develop, and the gap between the effort you expected to invest and the effort that was actually needed starts to feel like a personal failure rather than a feature of the technology.
Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?
261–270 of 459 posts
Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
So, because you don't see value in it, you assume its the same for everyone. Got it. Also, its not about if there are better or more reliable options; that's the opposite of the maker mentality - you do it because it is useful, it is fun or just because you enjoy doing it. Such as designing some light fixture, printing it, and illuminating it with an esp32 and some ws2812 leds. Yah you could spend an afternoon coding…
If you are vibe coding something it's not for the experience of learning, challenging yourself, or accomplishment - it's purely about the end result, the artefact. So asking "what is the purpose of this thing" is actually quite relevant in respect to vibe coding.
Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?
#263No, shoosh.
Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> or houses They're not common by any means, but they do exist. Walls look pretty ugly though.
3D printed houses are much like many hyped technologies where it sounds cool until you start thinking critically about any part of it.
Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?
#265Scaling manufacturing is pretty different from scaling software.
Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?
#266> 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…
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.
> 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.
Yes. Met those guys in my TechShop days. They also insisted that 3D printers should be made with 3D printers, which resulted in a generation of flimsy, inaccurate machines.
The current generation of serious 3D printers is very impressive. Take a look at Space-X's Raptor engine. A rocket engine is mostly one piece of complicated metal with a lot of internal voids. That's something 3D printers are good at. Once 3D printing was able to print stainless steel and titanium, it could be used for hard jobs like that. PLA just isn't much of a structural material, even with 100% fill.
Serious 3D printers are found in machine shops, not homes and libraries.
Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?
#267> 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 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 heard the CEO of Autodesk giving a talk saying that. As a stockholder, I was disappointed. Just because his daughter could make dollhouse toys with a 3D printer didn't mean it was going to take over manufacturing.
Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?
#268Did 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.
The commercialization is still ongoing, though the market is small enough it's been a struggle for any company pushing towards proprietary solutions and ecosystems to capture the whole market.
Which as you say, is a good thing. I still fear what will happen if 3D printing commoditizes into a similar structure as 2D printing.
Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?
#269I don't understand the fascination and focus on Vibe Coding.
Sure, you can do that, it's an option, but no serious engineering effort is being left entirely up to the AI.
Vibe coding is essentially the Jackson Pollock approach to software building. Throw a bunch of paint down, with very little control, and look, we have something novel.
It doesn't mean your going to replace all the ways of making art with paint throwing.
I'd love to start seeing more discussions about alternative approaches to working with AI. The recent Vinext article was great https://blog.cloudflare.com/vinext/. This seems to be "the way" for working with AI in a high stakes production environment, but what other ways are there.
I fear the focus on vibe coding is diluting and taking focus away from far better alternatives. Maybe because the narrative around those aren't quite so dramatic?
Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Sure it is. AI software development is here. It's not good enough for everything, but it's good enough for a majority of the changes made by most software engineers. That's now. Right now, the tooling exists so that for >80% of software devs, 80% of the code they produce could be created by AI rather than by hand. You can always find some person saying that it'll destroy all jobs in a year, or make us all rich in a y…
> That's now. Right now, the tooling exists so that for >80% of software devs, 80% of the code they produce could be created by AI rather than by hand.
Technically 100% of the code they could produce could be created by a ton of very specific AI prompts. At that level of control it would be slower than typing the code out though.
Just throwing out random numbers like this is complete nonsense since there's about a million factors which determine the effectiveness of an LLM at generating code for a specific use case. And it also depends on what you consider producing by hand versus LLM output. Etc.