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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?

#271
post #68
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.

[deleted]

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#272

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!!!

LLMs are the age of the builder in the same way that Uber eats is the age of the home cook.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#273
The maker movement evolved. It didn't disappear. Once the tools became accessible to a much wider audience, such as children, it became an integrated aspect of education. It also became a cultural tool. The author is focusing on a very narrow path to monetization and manufacturing. That wasn't the goal of the movement at all. That was how startup pitches tried to capture the movement and extract value. I see 3D printing machines that create structures out of adobe now. Huge ones. I see whole niche industries coming from laser cutters and CnC machines. People who started on Arduino boards now build music synthesizers and modular synth components. That movement continues and now offers a wide array of dividends.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#274
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's like saying that the amateur rocketry guys on youtube are going to replace NASA.

Good example! 90 percent ( or even more) of code do not need NASA level code. Vibe coding is good enough. Just like a five dollar t shirt is enough for many many people

Way more than 90% of code doesn’t need to be up to NASA standards. But there are many levels of quality between vibe coded and NASA engineered. Most code that makes money is in the middle, but should probably be closer the NASA end of the spectrum.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#275
It almost felt like a well poisoning those that were preaching towards casual audiences how 3d printing would bring in this era of having a little factory in your garage. A set of machines that'd make anything and everything without any expertise on the user's end, replacing most overseas production.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#276

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.

Yes, that made me sad. I just got into Arduino. I guess I'll have to stop now!

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sam…

Also, I have been called a bit of a hard-ass for this, but if the junior author of some piece of code is not able to explain to me why it is written that way or how they would extend it in a few reasonable cases, I consider that a problem.

This is orthogonal to both if it is well thought-out/naive/really strange code, or LLM generated/LLM assisted/hand written code. If there is a good understanding of the task and the goals behind it, the tools become secondary. If skills are lacking, it will end up a mess no matter the tools and it needs teaching.

Most of us could run stable servers with just ssh and vi. Would suck a lot though.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#278
post #41

> When you spend two years making useless Arduino projects, you develop instincts about electronics, materials, and design that you can’t get from a tutorial. When vibe coding goes straight to production, you lose that developmental space. The tool is powerful enough to produce real output before the person using it has developed real judgment. The crux of the problem. The only way to truly know is to get your hands…

Nah. There are corners of the industry where people still write ASM by hand when necessary, but for the vast, vast majority it's neither necessary (because compilers are great) or worthwhile (because it's so time consuming). Most code is written in high-level, interpreted languages with no particular attention paid to its performance characteristics. Despite the frustration of those of us who know better, businesses…

Compilers take a formal language and translate it to another formal language. In most cases there is no ambiguity, it’s deterministic, and most importantly it’s not chaotic.

That is changing one word in the source code doesn’t tend to produce a vastly different output, or changes to completely unrelated code.

Because the LLM is working from informal language, it is by necessity making thousands of small (and not so small) decisions about how to translate the prompt into code. There are far more decisions here than can reasonably fixed in tests/specs. So any changes to the prompt/spec is likely to result in unintended changes to observable behavior that users will notice and be confused by.

You’re right that programmers regularly churn out unoptimized code. But that’s very different than churning out a bubbling morass where ever little thing that isn’t bolted down is constantly changing.

The ambiguity in translation from prompt to code means that the code is still the spec and needs to be understood. Combine that with prompt instability and we’ll be stuck understanding code for the foreseeable future.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#280
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…

>> 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.

> never heard that.

This book was a big deal, promised it ("Makers, the next industrial revolution") https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/makers-chris-anderson/11109...

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