Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

It absolutely was the "promise" the media spun.

I had the relatively unique experience of moving from being an outsider to this field to being an insider. While I was an outsider, my impressions, formed by the media, was exactly that—3d printing would be the next big revolution, in a few years there'd be a printer in every home, etc.

I then joined a company that allocated a lot of resources to 3d printing. It only took me a month or two to realize that the big media claims were absolutely ridiculous, and didn't make any sense as stated. They misunderstood the state of the technology, and misunderstood basic economics and how regular manufacturing works.

That's not to say there's no value in 3d printing or the maker movement. There's a ton of value that's been uncovered. But the specific media dream of "people will be printing their plates at home instead of buying them in the store" was never real.

(Btw, IMO "vibe coding" is absolutely real and revolutionary, likely the biggest revolution in the software industry since, idk, the invention of the computer itself. And AI more generally is, even beyond vibe coding aspect, a revolutionary technology that will change the world in many ways.)

I agree, the only thing I can’t get past is the black box approach. For the majority of business stakeholders, they can’t/ don’t want to read the code that Opus, or any other agent produces. It will most likely work, but if it doesn’t, they have to rely on the agent to find & patch.

I’m with you though, it’s getting incredibly good at doing that, but that concept of “It works but I don’t know why” seems very dangerous at scale.

That last mile for apps isn’t trivial imo; to take them from “it’s cool and does exactly what I want”, to a scenario where all employees at our company can use it.

But who knows I might just be a naive dev lol, this stuff is changing too quickly.

Broadly true if you have $10M to throw at it, and know exactly what you want, or if what you want isn't something involving a "secret sauce".

But between competing startups doing something novel, original software is a moat. No moat is permanent; you leverage it into market share while you have time.

And no software itself is a secret, but the business logic and real-world operations it distills and caters to may be. The software is the least obfuscated part of encoding that set of operational logic, or even trade secrets, which are the DNA of a business and dictate the tools it goes into battle with.

Software being a moat (which it rarely is for long) is more of a question for the software industry. For other industries, software that amplifies best practices and crystalizes operational flow from the business logic can absolutely extend whatever moat the company already has.

In the small bore, if you have two midsized competing $100m companies in some arbitrary industry, the one that uses SaaS may be well behind the one that invested $1m in their own in-house software from the beginning, mostly because the one with SaaS must work their business logic around certain shortcomings, while the other can devise and deploy workflows for employees that may themselves create a new advantage the other company hasn't considered.