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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?

#331

Post by numpad0 »

> 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. What happened instead follows a pattern that Joel Spolsky described years ago in his essay on commoditizing your complement: cheap 3D printers and Arduinos made prototyping nearly free, which was genuinely useful. But the deep, compounding knowledge of how to actually manufacture things at scale continued to accumulate in industrial bases like Shenzhen. Prototyping got democratized. The cheap tools commodified one layer of the stack and made the layer beneath it more valuable by comparison.

> You can watch something structurally similar happening with vibe coding right now. People are rapidly prototyping tools that threaten to displace entire SaaS business models. But the value generated by all that rapid iteration and prototyping flows upward. It accumulates at the model layer, in the training data, in the infrastructure. The vibe coders themselves risk becoming interchangeable, each one spinning up impressive demos without accumulating durable value of their own. The pattern rhymes: cheap tools democratize one layer, and the layer beneath captures the surplus.

dot dot dot.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#332

Post by TurdF3rguson »

zahlman wrote: post #212
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…

> 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. It seems like a lot of vibe coders are people who otherwise wouldn't be coding at all.

If you're a web dev you're vibe coding. You might not be admitting it, but you're using those tools. Because you would be crazy not to.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#333

Post by AstroBen »

fooker wrote: post #301
hollowturtle wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Adobe Illustrator clone that plays well with latex for drawing diagrams in papers.

That's awesome! You could probably put Adobe out of business if you charge 10% their price.

If you did Illustrator in an afternoon it should only take a week or two for the whole product line?

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#334

Post by latexr »

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…

> Having 24/7 access to a patient person

It’s not a person. You understand that, right? I have to ask considering the amount of people who are “dating” and wanting to marry chatbots.

It’s a tool. There’s no reason to anthropomorphise it.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#336

Post by fooker »

AstroBen wrote: post #333
fooker wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adobe Illustrator clone that plays well with latex for drawing diagrams in papers.

That's awesome! You could probably put Adobe out of business if you charge 10% their price. If you did Illustrator in an afternoon it should only take a week or two for the whole product line?

No, that's not how it works.

It implements the (pretty large) subset of the tool I personally need.

But everyone needs a different subset, and maintaining a coherent codebase that supports everyone's need is difficult.

What could put Adobe and others out of business is everyone reaching for Claude code, cursor or codex the next time they need complex software tailored to their use case instead of the one size fits all software that is commercially available.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#338

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

inigyou wrote: post #167
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #140

Nah. The most universal rule of human nature is humans be lazy . Makers do extra effort for no real gain. Vibe coders do less effort for more gain. Vibe coding is what everyone wanted computers to be from the beginning. Tell it what to do, it does it. Actually, the future isn't vibe coding, it's vibe agenting . GPT 5.3 is so advanced, you don't need to write a program to do something. You tell the agent what you want…

At the same time, the quality of all this is absolute dogshit poor, so the market for things that actually work properly is probably still there. Which CEO recently had OpenClaw delete all their mail?

It's really not bad quality. The code written by AI is pretty decent now and fixing it is easy too. There are people making poor decisions with the technology (like OpenClaw); that doesn't make the technology bad.

With AI you can build tools fast. You can then version and release those tools, and improve them, fast. Then the AI can use that version of that tool. This gives the AI a fixed set of deterministic functionality that works the same way every time.

The CSO that had all their mail deleted happened because the tools they have right now aren't very good. Whatever that mail tool was, could be easily modified to have a limiter added that stops attempts to mass-delete emails. Hell, your own email client already will prompt you to confirm if you really want to "delete all emails" - because humans are stupid, like AI, and make mistakes, like AI. They just have to build the guardrails in, rather than hoping and praying that the AI will "behave itself". If the AI is a monkey at a joystick, we still control all the machinery attached to the joystick.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#339

Post by BobbyJo »

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.

Personally, I don't believe the big changes will come from "coding costs less for businesses". I think it will come from "trying new businesses is now cheaper, both in time and money". Smaller and cheaper players will be entering a lot of spaces over the next 5 years IMO.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#340

Post by blobbers »

I agree the central promise of 3D printers was they would get cheaper, better, and more like industrial grade and we would end up with this thing that could build replacement parts for anything in our home.

Instead what we were left with was an endless hunt for 'models', and no companies publishing their specs. Everything had to be done custom, and at best some niche manufacturing for weird side quests like adds ons for OneWheels, or cases for raspberry pis.

The closest thing to practical I have 3D printed is a wedge to better aim my google doorbell. I used to make some beautiful planters. I certainly am not 3D printing a droid, or a dishwasher impeller, or a fan blade for my 30 year old fridge.

So yes, while Claude code is fun, and you can build neat prototypes, it takes a lot of work to build a full product and then maintain it, scale it, deploy it. That takes persistent joy in what you're doing because you're not necessarily claude coding everything.

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