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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?

#371

Post by OakNinja »

tsss wrote: post #148
OakNinja wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently wrote a blog post about exactly this, and I agree with your perspective. Vibe coding helps with showing other people your idea and get them to understand it, try it and, most importantly, help you fail fast. But as the product matures, the gains of using LLM's and agentic engineering will go from 10000% efficiency to something like maybe 30(?)% productivity gain? Which is still awesome, of course. "The rea…

It's not awesome, not for us. 30% productivity gain would be enormous. Just imagine 30% of developers losing their jobs, in addition to outsourcing and all the new graduates flooding out of colleges after CS has been hyped so much in the recent years.

Good tooling, high level languages, faster computers and sane standards also enabled enormous productivity gains. I predict very few positions lost to LLM's, rather I'd say that just with any technical "revolution" we'll just set a new baseline for productivity, get rid of some bottlenecks, and have a new situation where we need even more engineers to maintain upkeep.

Most jobs lost to AI is just companies that want / need to lay people off and shareholders like "Replaced 30% of our workforce with AI" more than any other conceivable reason.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#372

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

noduerme wrote: post #367
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. It’s fungible from a macro perspective, so isn’t a moat by itself. 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; y…

> 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.

Counter anecdote: about a decade ago I was brought in by the new to the company director to lead the modernization of their in house Electronic Medical System software that was built on FoxPro in 1999 running with SQL Server 2000 and was maintained by two “developers” who had been their for a decade.

I led another project there first that was more pressing - in house mobile software maintained by two other “developers”. It was built on top of a mobile framework by a local startup. It was used by home health care nurses for special needs kids.

After I got my head around the business, what they were trying to do - PE owned and acquiring other companies whose systems they need to integrate and their margins were low - mostly Medicaid reimbursements - I decided the best thing I could do was put myself out of a job.

I told the director we have no business trying to build up a software development department. We moved everything to various SaaS products and paid consulting companies to make all of the customizations. Meaning they sign a statement of work and come back with a finished product.

Software development was never going to be this company’s competitive moat. They got rid of the two developers maintaining the mobile app and contracted that out. The two other developers who had maintained the FoxPro app became “data analysts” and report writers.

Every company does need to know its numbers

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#373

Post by atoav »

I run a medialab in an art university. My suggestion is that it will have the opposite effect as I now see students who would have never dared to use code, use it. I have also seen a LLM suggest electrical advice to a student that would have reliably started a fire, but hey.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#374

Post by peteforde »

bandrami wrote: post #360
peteforde wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They just aren't affordable or they just aren't buying them? Either way, I suppose the answer is relative and subjective and Bambu Lab would not agree with you.

People just aren't buying them. They're about as affordable as any other hobby AFAIK

I don't know why you believe this, but it's not even remotely accurate.

I didn't want to argue with you, so I did some research.

The global 3D printer market grew from USD$24B in 2024 to $30B in 2025. It's estimated to grow 24% y/y for the next decade: https://www.marketdataforecast.com/market-reports/3d-printer...

If you Google it, this is generally matched by 5-6 different research companies.

Laser cutters are a USD$7B global market today, and also expected to grow around ~8% y/y into the next decade: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/Laser-Cutti...

A huge number of YouTube channel creators I subscribe to have received Carvera CNC mills over the past few months. Anecdotal but striking. It seems like everyone who left LTT to go solo has a CNC now, even if they usually review graphics cards.

Opulo, the makers of the Lumen PnP cannot achieve less than a 1 month lead time, seemingly no matter how many people they hire or how much factory space they acquire. And that's a pretty niche device, relatively speaking.

In conclusion, you're wrong.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#375

Post by peteforde »

klodolph wrote: post #362
peteforde wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What are you doing with TTL logic in 2026, out of curiosity? (I’m not saying it’s not used, but the only thing I’d use TTL for is building old circuits out of the Forrest Mims books.)

Reasonable question and hopefully an interesting answer...

The simple lack of reasons to use TTL logic in 2026 was exactly why I didn't know what the deal was. It'd never come up, but I'd see it referenced.

I'm self-taught and in defiance of the people who insist that LLMs turn our brains to passive mush, the more things I learn the more things I have to be curious about.

LLMs remove the gatekeeping around asking "simple" questions that tend to make EEs roll their eyes. I didn't know, so I asked and now I know!

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#376

Post by sarchertech »

ytoawwhra92 wrote: post #356
paulryanrogers wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How? Are you thinking of adversarial AI reviewers, runtime tests (also by AI), or something else? Guess I just don't see how you can take the human out of the loop and replace them with non-deterministic AIs and informal prompts / specs.

> adversarial AI reviewers, runtime tests (also by AI), or something else? And spec management, change previews, feedback capture at runtime, skill libraries, project scaffolding, task scoping analysis, etc. Right now this stuff is all rudimentary, DIY, or non-existent. As the more effective ways to use LLMs becomes clearer I expect we'll see far more polished, tightly-integrated tooling built to use LLMs in those wa…

Agents require tests to keep from spinning out of control when writing more than a few thousand lines, but we know that tests are wildly insufficient to describe the state of the actual code.

You are essentially saying that we should develop other methods of capturing the state of the program to prevent unintended changes.

However there’s no reason to believe that these other systems will be any easier to reason about than the code itself. If we had these other methods of ensuring that observerable behavior doesn’t change and they were substantially easier than reasoning about the code directly, they would be very useful for human developers as well.

The fact that we’ve not developed something like this in 75 years of writing programs, says it’s probably not as easy as you’re making it out.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#377

Post by sarchertech »

gilfaethwy wrote: post #350
paulryanrogers wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How? Are you thinking of adversarial AI reviewers, runtime tests (also by AI), or something else? Guess I just don't see how you can take the human out of the loop and replace them with non-deterministic AIs and informal prompts / specs.

Humans are also non-deterministic, though. Why does replacing one non-deterministic actor with another matter here? I'm not particularly swayed by arguments of consciousness, whether AI is currently capable of "thinking", etc. Those may matter right now... but how long will they continue to matter for the vast majority of use cases? Generally speaking, my feeling is that most code doesn't need to be carefully-crafted…

It has nothing to do with whether small mistakes are allowable or not. It’s about customers needing a consistent product.

The in-code tests and the expectations/assumptions about the product that your users have are wildly different. If you allow agents to make changes restricted only by those tests, they’re going to constantly make changes that break customer workflows and cause noticeable jank.

Right now agents do this at a rate far higher than humans. This is empirically demonstrable by the fact that an agent requires tests to keep from spinning out of control when writing more than a few thousand lines and a human does not. A human is capable of writing tens of thousands as of lines with no tests, using only reason and judgement. An agent is not.

They clearly lack the full capability of human reason, judgment, taste, and agency.

My suspicion is that something close enough to AGI that it can essentially do all white dollar jobs is required to solve this.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#378

Post by Animats »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #327
muvlon wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> You can use a milling to mill a bunch of pieces for a milling machine. Now that CNC mills get more affordable, people are starting to get vocal about their visions of a self-milling CNC mill. :-)

A classic manual Bridgeport mill, a foundry for making castings, a heat-treating furnace, a steel planer, a lathe, a drill press, a grinder, and a supply of steel is enough for a master machinist to reproduce all that. That's what was used to make machine tools in the first half of the 20th century.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#379

Post by bandrami »

peteforde wrote: post #374
bandrami wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People just aren't buying them. They're about as affordable as any other hobby AFAIK

I don't know why you believe this, but it's not even remotely accurate. I didn't want to argue with you, so I did some research. The global 3D printer market grew from USD$24B in 2024 to $30B in 2025. It's estimated to grow 24% y/y for the next decade: https://www.marketdataforecast.com/market-reports/3d-printer... If you Google it, this is generally matched by 5-6 different research companies. Laser cutters are a US…

No, you did a great job arguing my point: it's a market in the tens of billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of units, so somewhere between saltwater aquaria and golf

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#380

Post by pu_pe »

the_af wrote: post #237
tayo42 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do people build to impress with an implementation that no one cares about really? Or to share the end product? I think now you are freed up to make a shooter that people will actually want to play. Or at least attempt it. We probably need to come to terms with the idea that no one cares about those details. Really, 2 years ago no one would have cared about your hand crafted 3d shooter either I think.

> I think now you are freed up to make a shooter that people will actually want to play. Or at least attempt it. Taking this to an extreme, let's say vibe coding becomes real enough, and frictionless enough, that you can prompt a first person shooter into existence in a few minutes or hours. If/when this becomes true, nobody will want to play your shooter. You'll share your shooter with people and if they care at all…

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