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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?

#71

Post by em-bee »

piker wrote: post #9
GrinningFool wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's often genuine excitement to share a thing - without quite processing that anybody with the same idea can now build it (for simple- to mid-complexity projects).

This is the part I don't understand. It's like sharing a finger painting half the time. Yes, cool, but so what? [Edit: no need for the downvote, folks, it was an honest question although it seemed otherwise. I think the answers below make sense.]

xkcd turned stick figure drawings into an art form. sometimes it is not about how something was created, but about the story being told.

some people build apps to solve a problem. why should they not share how they solved that problem?

i have written a blog post about a one line command that solves an interesting problem for me. for any experienced sysadmin that's just like a finger painting.

do we really need to argue if i should have written that post or not?

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#72

Post by fzeroracer »

movedx01 wrote: post #58
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.

It doesn't matter, neither of those scenarios makes the effort impressive in this case. The vibe coded thing might even be useful - that does not make it impressive though. Effort does.

This is what I think a lot of the people who advocate for 'AI generated images being art' don't get. There's no effort or intentionality into what's being created; it has the look and appearance of 'polished art' (that breaks down when you look closer) but behind it is nothing.

It's also why AI generated code is a nightmare to read and deal with, because the intention behind the code does not exist. Code outputting malformed input because it was a requirement two years ago, a developer throwing in a quick hack to fix a problem, these are things you can divine and figure out from everything else.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#73

Post by the_af »

tootubular wrote: post #66
james2doyle wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're absolutely right Bot detected

But crucially they used "--" and not "—" which means they're safe. Unless it's learning. I may still be peeved that my beloved em dash has been tainted. :(

Of course they'll learn. LLM bots have been spotted on HN using that hipster all lower case style of writing.

i can write like this if i want. or if i were a clever ai bot.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#75

Post by alwa »

rglover wrote: post #41

> 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…

Then again, sophisticated manufactured electronics had long been cheap and available by the time somebody thought to create Arduino as a platform in the first place.

And even today, people hack on assembly and ancient mainframe languages and demoscene demos and Atari ROMs and the like (mainly for fun but sometimes with the explicit intention of developing that flavor of judgment).

I predict with high confidence that not even Claude will stop tinkerers from tinkering.

All of our technical wizardry will become anachronistic eventually. Here I stand, Ozymandius, king of motorcycle repair, 16-bit assembly, and radio antennae bent by hand…

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#76

Post by dd8601fn »

Conscat wrote: post #68
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…

I was a kid at the time, but adults, magazines, and other children convinced me that 3D printing at home would likely replace a huge number of products. This included extremely optimistic speculation, like printers producing smart phones or houses. Then I dated a boy who used his 3D printer to substitute The Container Store at a higher cost with greater effort and lower quality, and that soured me on the concept.

I remember hearing “trek replicator” in things like pop mechanics, back in the 90s.

Then it was a lot of “self replicating printers” for quite a while, which never has been a real thing.

Certainly there’s utility in the technology, and much moreso if you’re making aircraft parts. And I love prototyping with my various machines.

But I agree, it has had far more than its fair share of hype at the home printer level.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#77

Post by Izkata »

Conscat wrote: post #68
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…

I was a kid at the time, but adults, magazines, and other children convinced me that 3D printing at home would likely replace a huge number of products. This included extremely optimistic speculation, like printers producing smart phones or houses. Then I dated a boy who used his 3D printer to substitute The Container Store at a higher cost with greater effort and lower quality, and that soured me on the concept.

> or houses

They're not common by any means, but they do exist. Walls look pretty ugly though.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#78

Post by waffletower »

The author writes as if he didn't know 'aider' even existed. "Vibe coding skipped that phase entirely" is dead wrong. What may be different is that the cycle was incredibly short before Anthropic made it mainstream with Claude Code. Gemini CLI, definitely a Claude Code imitator, existed long before The New York Times knew what Claude Code was. Openclaw -- a decidedly different agentic AI application -- is part of another period where weirdos are playing with tools.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#79

Post by epiccoleman »

rglover wrote: post #41

> 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…

I might be tilting at a strawman of your definition of vibe coding - apologies in advance if so.

But LLM-aided development is helping me get my hands dirty.

Last weekend, I encountered a bug in my Minecraft server. I run a small modded server for my kids and I to play on, and a contraption I was designing was doing something odd.

I pulled down the mod's codebase, the fabric-api codebase (one of the big modding APIs), and within an hour or so, I had diagnosed the bug and fixed it. Claude was essential in making this possible. Could I have potentially found the bug myself and fixed it? Almost certainly. Would I have bothered? Of course not. I'd have stuck a hopper between the mod block and the chest and just hacked it, and kept playing.

But, in the process of making this fix, and submitting the PR to fabric, I learned things that might make the next diagnosis or tweak that much easier.

Of course it took human judgment to find the bug, characterize it, test it in-game. And look! My first commit (basically fully written by Claude) took the wrong approach! [1]

Through the review process I learned that calling `toStack` wasn't the right approach, and that we should just add a `getMaxStackSize` to `ItemVariantImpl`. I got to read more of the codebase, I took the feedback on board, made a better commit (again, with Claude), and got the PR approved. [2]

They just merged the commit yesterday. Code that I wrote (or asked to have written, if we want to be picky) will end up on thousands of machines. Users will not encounter this issue. The Fabric team got a free bugfix. I learned things.

Now, again - is this a strawman of your point? Probably a little. It's not "vibe coding going straight to production." Review and discernment intervened to polish the commit, expertise of the Fabric devs was needed. Sending the original commit straight to "production" would have been less than ideal. (arguably better than leaving the bug unfixed, though!)

But having an LLM help doesn't have to mean that less understanding and instinct is built up. For this case, and for many other small things I've done, it just removed friction and schlep work that would otherwise have kept me from doing something useful.

This is, in my opinion, a very good thing!

[1]: https://github.com/FabricMC/fabric-api/pull/5220/changes/3e3...

[2]: https://github.com/FabricMC/fabric-api/pull/5220/changes

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