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The crux of the problem. The only way to truly know is to get your hands dirty. There are no shortcuts, only future liabilities.
My general take on most vibe coding projects ("Hey, look, I built this over the weekend"), is general dismissiveness. Mostly because of the effort required, i.e. why should I care about something that someone did with almost zero effort, a few prompts? If someone tells me they ran a marathon, I'm impressed because I know that took work. If someone tells me they jogged 100 meters, I don't care at all (unless they were…
It's hard to not be dismissive or gate-keeping with this stuff, my goal isn't to discourage anyone or to fight against the lower barriers to entry, but it's simply a different thing when someone prompts a private AI model to make a thing in an hour.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When movies first came out they would film random stuff because it was cool to see a train moving directly at you. The novelty didn't wear off for years .
There was something someone said in a comment here, years and years ago (pre AI), which has stuck with me. Paraphrased, "There's basically no business in the Western world that wouldn't come out ahead with a competent software engineer working for $15 an hour". Once agents, or now claws I guess, get another year of development under them they will be everywhere. People will have the novelty of "make me a website. Mak…
> 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…
The “maker movement” isn’t dead and it wasn’t born recently either. People have been DIYing for all sorts of reasons for very long time.
Yeah but now vibe coding will make DIY-ers look like a bunch of luddites. And mastering a technology has lost its point.
> 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…
You're absolutely right -- that's the crux of the problem. There are no shortcuts, only future liabilities.
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TL;DR Quick answer: No. Long answer: its the opposite; as an example, can use claude code to generate, build and debug ESP32 code for a given purpose; suddenly everyone can build smart gizmos without having to learn c/c++ and having knowledge of a ton of libraries.
For what purpose exactly? I have Arduino and raspberry Pi boards. I am perfectly capable of hand writing code that runs on these machines. But they are sitting in the drawer gathering dust, because I don't have a use case -- everything I could possibly do with them is either not actually useful on a daily basis, or there are much better & reliable solutions for the actual issue. I literally spent hours going through…
Also, its not about if there are better or more reliable options; that's the opposite of the maker mentality - you do it because it is useful, it is fun or just because you enjoy doing it.
Such as designing some light fixture, printing it, and illuminating it with an esp32 and some ws2812 leds. Yah you could spend an afternoon coding color transitions. Or use claude code for that.
There are plenty of products now that only exist because of what it did deliver on. Any one who spends time in the niche communities where it is thriving can see that... On the low end look at Apollo automation, the story of Grismo Knives, at the high end look a Hadrian Manufacturing.
Vibe coding is a terrible name, but what a skilled dev can do with a deeply integrated AI coding assistant is amazing. It changes the calculus of "Is it worth your time" (see: https://xkcd.com/1205/ ).
Is it helpful in my day to day: it sure is. Is it far more helpful in doing all the things that have been on the back burner for YEARS? My gods yes! But none of that is matching the hype thats out there around "vibe coding".