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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?

#311

Post by aleph_minus_one »

Animats wrote: post #266
analog31 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

I do believe that this vision is basically correct, but the implementation of these eager 3D printing enthusiasts was deeply flawed:

There exist lots of designs of really good 3D printers on the internet that are at least partly 3D-printed. So at least a relevant subset of the parts of a 3D printer can be 3D-printed. The reason why commercial 3D printers are typically not 3D-printed is rather aesthetics and the fact that for large-scale manufacturing there typically exist much cheaper production techniques.

As people by now have realized (and some of these points were told to these eager 3D printing enthusiasts from beginning on), the correct approach to get towards an exceptional "mostly 3D-printed 3D printer" is rather:

- Improve 3D printers so that even more parts of a 3D printer can be 3D-printed in high quality (e.g. by improving sensors and software to increase precision; make the 3D printer capable of handling engineeering materials; ...)

- Use a 3D printer to produce parts for machines that can be used to produce parts for a 3D printer, such as CNC mill, CNC lathe, pick and place machine (for populating the PCBs) etc.

Both of these aspects are hot topics that people work on.

In other words: Accept for now that many, but not all parts of a 3D printer can currently sensibly be 3D-printed, and invest serious efforts to develop solutions how 3D printing can be used to enable a high-quality production of these remaining parts.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#312

Post by steve_adams_86 »

andsoitis wrote: post #309
peteforde wrote: post #307

I've got to be honest: my complete skepticism that the maker movement is somehow past tense makes it extremely difficult for me to take this tenuous comparison to LLM coding particularly seriously. The author talks about lowered barriers to prototyping as though they represent a failure state; that's absurd, and it has absolutely nothing to do with whether most people have membership-based maker spaces nearby. Meanwh…

> It's now possible for people to buy affordable CNCs, laser cutters and UV printers. Do a lot of people do it? Maybe the answer is a tentative yes, given news like the recent case about guns and 3D printing.

There are plenty of companies iterating on and selling these products so I assume yes, people are buying them.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#313

Post by steve_adams_86 »

peteforde wrote: post #307

I've got to be honest: my complete skepticism that the maker movement is somehow past tense makes it extremely difficult for me to take this tenuous comparison to LLM coding particularly seriously. The author talks about lowered barriers to prototyping as though they represent a failure state; that's absurd, and it has absolutely nothing to do with whether most people have membership-based maker spaces nearby. Meanwh…

I'm in the same camp.

I don't love that my career seems to be evaporating and perhaps no one will have a use for me soon, but, LLMs have made making even easier and more fun than ever. My sense of what I can take on has been amplified so much, it feels like a super power. Reverse engineering things used to be intimidating to take on, but now it feels like a couple afternoons of exploring with Claude. Understanding the scope of ideas is way more accessible, and often more constrained than it used to be.

I learn so much more than I used to, I get more done than I used to. I love it.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#314

Post by aleph_minus_one »

pradn wrote: post #162
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…

One of the odd things people do with tech is taking someone else's random projections at face value? What does it mean to say "we were promised flying cars", or "every city would have micro-factories, that 3D printing would decentralize production"? The people creating these narratives may a) truly believe it and tried to make it a reality, but failed b) never believed it at all, but failed anyway, c) or be somewhere…

> What does it mean to say "we were promised flying cars"

This promise did get fulfilled: helicopters do exist.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#315

Post by peteforde »

fao_ wrote: post #310
peteforde wrote: post #307

I've got to be honest: my complete skepticism that the maker movement is somehow past tense makes it extremely difficult for me to take this tenuous comparison to LLM coding particularly seriously. The author talks about lowered barriers to prototyping as though they represent a failure state; that's absurd, and it has absolutely nothing to do with whether most people have membership-based maker spaces nearby. Meanwh…

I disagree with your framing cynicism as an "agenda". For the record, I agree that the maker movement hasn't actually ended, and most of your points are correct; however, the idea of LLMs teaching Electronics worries me about as much as people using LLMs to learn Chemistry. A little while ago I had to dissuade someone from learning Chemistry via an LLM, because the advice that they had been given by the LLM would hav…

I guess we have to agree to disagree, because I am not particularly interested in chemistry and ChatGPT has been extraordinarily helpful in demystifying electronics. Having 24/7 access to a patient person who can unpack the difference between TTL and CMOS logic or when you'd choose a buffer instead of a Schmitt trigger without belittling you for not already knowing what they know is awesome and not going to get anyone even slightly killed.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#316

Post by muvlon »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #311
Animats wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. I do believe that this vision is basically correct, but the implementation of these eager 3D printing enthusiasts was deeply flawed: There exist lots of designs of really good 3D printers on the internet that are at least partly 3D-printed. So a…

Sure, and that's useful but not revolutionary nor exclusive to 3D printers. You can use a milling to mill a bunch of pieces for a milling machine. You can use a PCB printer to print the PCBs for a PCB printer. A 3D printer is much, much closer to this than it is to a self-replicating machine.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#317

Post by peteforde »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #313
peteforde wrote: post #307

I've got to be honest: my complete skepticism that the maker movement is somehow past tense makes it extremely difficult for me to take this tenuous comparison to LLM coding particularly seriously. The author talks about lowered barriers to prototyping as though they represent a failure state; that's absurd, and it has absolutely nothing to do with whether most people have membership-based maker spaces nearby. Meanwh…

I'm in the same camp. I don't love that my career seems to be evaporating and perhaps no one will have a use for me soon, but, LLMs have made making even easier and more fun than ever. My sense of what I can take on has been amplified so much, it feels like a super power. Reverse engineering things used to be intimidating to take on, but now it feels like a couple afternoons of exploring with Claude. Understanding th…

Hear, hear!

I am quite tired of skeptics and naysayers telling me that I'm only imagining learning, only imagining finishing projects, only imagining having more time for the fun parts.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#318

Post by peteforde »

andsoitis wrote: post #309
peteforde wrote: post #307

I've got to be honest: my complete skepticism that the maker movement is somehow past tense makes it extremely difficult for me to take this tenuous comparison to LLM coding particularly seriously. The author talks about lowered barriers to prototyping as though they represent a failure state; that's absurd, and it has absolutely nothing to do with whether most people have membership-based maker spaces nearby. Meanwh…

> It's now possible for people to buy affordable CNCs, laser cutters and UV printers. Do a lot of people do it? Maybe the answer is a tentative yes, given news like the recent case about guns and 3D printing.

I would put "you can make anything" -> "I will print guns!" strongly in the "no creative ideas" category.

Honestly, it's baffling that anyone would put real effort into printing guns when it seems as though some countries cough make it easy to pick one up at Walmart.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#319

Post by muh_gradle »

peteforde wrote: post #315
fao_ wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with your framing cynicism as an "agenda". For the record, I agree that the maker movement hasn't actually ended, and most of your points are correct; however, the idea of LLMs teaching Electronics worries me about as much as people using LLMs to learn Chemistry. A little while ago I had to dissuade someone from learning Chemistry via an LLM, because the advice that they had been given by the LLM would hav…

I guess we have to agree to disagree, because I am not particularly interested in chemistry and ChatGPT has been extraordinarily helpful in demystifying electronics. Having 24/7 access to a patient person who can unpack the difference between TTL and CMOS logic or when you'd choose a buffer instead of a Schmitt trigger without belittling you for not already knowing what they know is awesome and not going to get anyon…

noooo we have to go back to stackoverflow to feel small.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#320

Post by aleph_minus_one »

andsoitis wrote: post #309
peteforde wrote: post #307

I've got to be honest: my complete skepticism that the maker movement is somehow past tense makes it extremely difficult for me to take this tenuous comparison to LLM coding particularly seriously. The author talks about lowered barriers to prototyping as though they represent a failure state; that's absurd, and it has absolutely nothing to do with whether most people have membership-based maker spaces nearby. Meanwh…

> It's now possible for people to buy affordable CNCs, laser cutters and UV printers. Do a lot of people do it? Maybe the answer is a tentative yes, given news like the recent case about guns and 3D printing.

> Maybe the answer is a tentative yes, given news like the recent case about guns and 3D printing.

In my observation these news lead to maker nerds "prepper-buying" (get such a machine before they become forbidden) quite a lot of such machines recently. :-)

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