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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?

#291

Post by [deleted] »

ytoawwhra92 wrote: post #259
rglover wrote: 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…

[deleted]

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#292

Post by 14 »

I have not yet tried vibe coding but it is something I look forward to trying when I get some free time (kids growing up a little).

I assume some could use it to make for commercial sale products but when I heard of it I really just pictured it mainly for small personal projects mainly.

I have always had an interest in electronics but without going to college there was really obvious no path to get into creating small diy projects. Then years back came along Raspberry Pi. I bought one along with a big variety of different sensors and a breadboard and all the things one would need to create something. I pictures making things that would email my mom when her plants were getting dry and many other dreams with all the sensors.

But it was still overwhelming. Lots of knowledge you need before you even start so it felt hard. But eventually I set off to try something and with many hours of searching for how to code what I wanted and essentially copying code and maybe slightly altering it to my needs I did finish one project. It was basic but I was always proud of what I accomplished. I had an IR sensor that would detect if someone walked in front of it and when that happened I also had a power relay that was connected to a lamp. When motion detected the lamp would then blink SOS in Morse code and it would also send me an email saying motion detected. What a feeling when I ran it and it worked on the first try.

But that took so much time searching and trying to find the code I wanted. I see vibe coding and imagine I could do the same thing in minutes verses hours. I don't think I will ever make some project that is ever going to make me money but do imagine with vibe coding the barrier to creating some of those projects I dreamed up in my head for personal use is much closer and obtainable.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#293

Post by jackp96 »

ramathornn wrote: post #82
jmull wrote: 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…

> BTW, I think a lot of people were/are greatly overestimating the value of coding to business success. Fully agree - We already saw dev prices drop significantly when offshore dev shops spun up. I've had great, and also horrible experiences working with devs that could produce lines of code at a fraction of the price of any senior type dev. The higher paid engineers i've worked with are always worth their salary/hou…

I think it's really dependent on the software. And frankly, with the current rate of development, I feel like this continues to shift.

No, a non-engineer can't just spin up the next great app. Even with the newest models and a great prompting/testing system, I don't think you can just spit out high quality, maintainable, reliable code. But as a generalist - I'm absolutely able to ship software and tools that solve our business problems.

Right now, my company identified an expensive software platform that was set to cost us around $250k/year. People in the industry are raving about it.

I've spent 1-2 weeks recreating the core functionality (with a significantly enhanced integration into our CRM and internal analytics) in both a web app and mobile application. And it's gone far smoother than I expected. It's not done - and maybe we'll run into some blocker. But this would have taken me 6 months, at least, to build half as well.

I was an AI skeptic for most of last year. It provided value, sure, but it felt like we were plateauing. Slowing down.

I'd hoped we might be slowing down to some sort of invisible ceiling. I was faster than ever - but it very much required a level of experience that felt reasonable and fair.

It feels different now.

I'd say ~70% of my Claude Opus results just work. I tweak the UI and refactor when possible. And it runs into issues I have to solve occasionally. But otherwise? If I'm specific, if I have it brainstorm, then plan, and then implement - then it usually just works.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#294

Post by schiffern »

scottLobster wrote: post #191
lich_king wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I never heard that I did, a lot, maybe fifteen years ago. There was a lot of talk about a "3D printing revolution" and being years away from being able to make whatever you want at home. For a while, the "maker" moniker was strongly associated with home manufacturing maximalists. I still don't get the point the article is making, though. That 3D printer thinking was obviously naive because it underestimated the dif…

Also hiring. It's easier to find people with JIRA experience than people in your vibe-coded ticket manager, even if it is technically superior for your application. If there is any commonality between the 3D printing craze and vibe-coding, they're both renditions of "just because you can, doesn't mean you should".

The claimed commonality is "early maximalist optimism turns into mature niche adoption."

Could be different this time around, or could be that the early naive optimism is just more widespread.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#298

Post by bluGill »

rustystump wrote: post #133
nineteen999 wrote: post #109

Earlier 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…

I think it is a misnomer to attribute startup failure to bad code. There are so many other factors at play that are more powerful. Not to say the crowd u speak of doesn’t exist, they do.

Bad code is one possible axis - not a likely one at that stage though. Bad code gets you a few years down the line when competitors are moving faster than you to the point where they are cheaper and better.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#299

Post by eggplantiny »

The "consumption" frame is more honest than "craft," agreed. But it falls into the exact same hole. Taste accumulation, attention capture, gift economy, signal fortress—they're all variations of "how do I assetize the byproducts?" The frame changed, but the question didn't: what do I get out of this?

The author already touched on a better answer. Scenius worked because of the "permission to fuck around." Nobody expected your Arduino to ship. But the conclusion hands you four value-capture strategies and quietly revokes that permission. "Play freely, but collect the exhaust" isn't permission—it's a conditional license.

I once learned songwriting from an indie musician who refused autotune and wrote by hand. He said the point of busking isn't playing because there's an audience. It's playing when nobody stops. You play anyway. That's how you find your sound.

This gets at the root of "evaluative anesthesia." It's not that our tools are too powerful. It's that we're asking "is this valuable?" at every step. A busker doesn't ask that. Taste and judgment accumulate as a residue of immersion, not deliberate capture.

What vibe coding needs isn't a smarter consumption strategy. It might just be the courage to play to an empty street.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#300

Post by vicchenai »

The maker movement comparison works on the surface but misses a key asymmetry: 3D printing failed partly because physical atoms still cost money to produce and ship. Code has zero marginal reproduction cost. Every vibe-coded tool that ships becomes infinitely cheap to distribute.

The more interesting question is what vibe coding actually democratizes. It's not engineering---it's implementation. The bottleneck shifts from 'can you write the code' to 'do you understand the domain well enough to specify what the code should do, and verify it's doing that correctly.'

I've watched domain experts---people with deep subject matter knowledge who previously couldn't build because they lacked CS fundamentals---suddenly able to ship working tools. Code quality is often brittle. But the problem understanding is sharp, because they're building something they actually needed.

The maker analogy would have been more accurate if 3D printers only failed when you asked them to print something you didn't fully understand. That's where vibe coding fails too.

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