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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?

#281
post #68

Earlier 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.

Just like with vibecoding complains, have you tried the latest models (of 3d printers)? Specifically, Bambu's latest models make the printer a device to just use rather than the project itself. It's the Apple of 3d printing. Previously, you'd spend hours on calibrating and leveling nonsense. Latest models don't have this problem. Open the app on your phone, (doom)scroll until you find something, and just hit print fr…

Having a 3d printer without learning how to use a cad seems kind of pointless.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#283
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…

HA hey before you code then hope you roll your own silicon because otherwise its just shortcuts.

This is such high minded bullshit.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#284
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…

> Vibe coding, on the other hand, is competing against hand coding, and for many use cases is considerably more efficient. It’s clearly replacing a lot of hand coding.

Vibe coding, like 3D printing, is great for little small batch runs of boutique code. Small toy apps and throwaway projects.

Vibe coding is shit for doing actual maintenance on important projects that actually run the world. It is shit for creating anything that is of robust long lasting quality. It is shit for creating code you can trust. It is shit for creating code that won’t suddenly reveal flaws and inefficiencies at scale and require an entire proper rewrite just when your product is finally gaining traction. Vibe coding has not been around long enough to make these problems obvious yet, but the time is coming. A few high profile failures will hit the media and then suddenly everyone starts coming out of the woodwork with their own vibe coding horror stories and thus the AI bubble collapse begins.

What people will eventually realize, is that if you’re building a serious business with software that must run reliably for years, it really doesn’t give you any advantage being able to vibe code something in a week vs carefully building something out over a few months. Being unable to vibe code your way out of non-trivial maintenance issues is a death sentence for your business, you will need people who know what they are doing eventually.

Relying on vibe coding causes you to have a talent debt, and though you won’t feel it when you’re first rolling out a business, eventually, the bill comes due…

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#285
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…

"users seem to choose velocity over quality pretty consistently"

When do they have a real choice, without vendor lock-in or other pressure?

Windows 11 is 4 years old but until a few months ago barely managed to overtake Windows 10. Despite upgrades that were only "by choice" in the most user hostile sense imaginable (those dark patterns were so misleading I know multiple people who didn't notice that they "agreed" to it, and as it pop ups repeatedly it only takes a single wrong click to mess up). It doesn't look like people are very excited about the "velocity".

In the gaming industry AAA titles being thrown on the market in an unfinished state tends to also not go over well with the users, but there they have more power to make a choice as the market is huge and games aren't necessary tools, and such games rarely recover after a failed launch.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#286
There is no getting around the fact that projects that used to take man-years are possible in an afternoon now.

And this is the worst this technology is ever going to be :)

Don't take my word for it, go try building something that you always wanted to build but did not have time for. If you do not have something like that at the back of your head, I doubt you have to be concerned about this topic.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#289
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 agree with you. To me the maker movement has always been about people wanting to tinker and create things for themselves. If anything "vibe coding" makes the maker movement more accessible because people who couldn't (or didn't want to) code can try to have AI code the thing they're building.

And there are plenty of people in the maker movement who enjoy writing code, and will write it whether other people are vibe coding or not.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#290
post #286

There is no getting around the fact that projects that used to take man-years are possible in an afternoon now. And this is the worst this technology is ever going to be :) Don't take my word for it, go try building something that you always wanted to build but did not have time for. If you do not have something like that at the back of your head, I doubt you have to be concerned about this topic.

What did you build that would have gotten man years before?
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