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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?

#81

Post by margalabargala »

rockskon wrote: post #61
margalabargala wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's always a year® away. The amazing AI capability is "just around the corner"©. It will replace jobs soon™. How much longer do we have to put up with people saying this? It's been four years now.

The things that people were saying were a year away a year or two ago are now here.

The things I am saying are now a year away, are not the things people were saying were a year away two years ago.

And you're going to have to put up with it forever, because "a year in the future" has always and will always be a year away.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#82

Post by ramathornn »

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.

Fully agree - We already saw dev prices drop significantly when offshore dev shops spun up. I've had great, and also horrible experiences working with devs that could produce lines of code at a fraction of the price of any senior type dev.

The higher paid engineers i've worked with are always worth their salary/hourly rate because of the way they approach problems and the solutions they come up with.

Agents are great at building out features, i'm not so sure about complex software that grows over time. Unless you know the right questions to ask, the agent misses alot. 80/20 doesn't work for systems that need 100% reliability.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#84

Post by OakNinja »

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 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 real test of Vibe coding is whether people will finally realize the cost of software development is in the maintenance, not in the creation."

https://blog.oak.ninja/shower-thoughts/2026/02/12/business-i...

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#85

Post by Aurornis »

> and it has to do with how the Maker Movement actually ended.

> 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.

This version of the Maker Movement only ever existed in news articles and hype bubbles.

The Maker Movement was never about building small factories and consumer 3D printing was never about manufacturing things at scale. Everyone who was into 3D printing knew that we weren't going to be 3D printing all of our plastic parts at home because the limitations of FDM printing are obvious to anyone who has used one. At the time, consumer 3D printers were rare so journalists were extrapolating from what they saw and imagined a line going up and to the right until they could produce anything you wanted in your home.

The Maker Movement where people play with Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and cheap 3D printers is possibly stronger than ever. Everything is so cheap and accessible now. 10 years ago getting a 3D printer to produce parts was a chore that required a lot of knowledge and time. Now for a couple hundred dollars anyone can have a 3D printer at home that is mostly user friendly and lets them focus on printing things.

The real version of the Maker Movement just isn't that interesting to mainstream because, well, it's a bunch of geeks doing geeky things. There's also sadly a lot of unnecessary infighting and drama that occurs in maker-related companies, like the never ending Arduino company drama, the recent Teensy drama that goes back years, or the way some people choose their 3D printer supplier as their personal identity would rather argue about them online than print.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#86

Post by rockskon »

margalabargala wrote: post #81
rockskon wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's always a year® away. The amazing AI capability is "just around the corner"©. It will replace jobs soon™. How much longer do we have to put up with people saying this? It's been four years now.

The things that people were saying were a year away a year or two ago are now here. The things I am saying are now a year away, are not the things people were saying were a year away two years ago. And you're going to have to put up with it forever, because "a year in the future" has always and will always be a year away.

And yet it's never "now". The promised results are never here.

I understand one of the chief innovations the AI industry produces is rhetoric and hype, but it's insufferable and repetitive.

A better AI isn't good enough. "Closer" to a stated goal isn't good enough.

Deliver results that have value to more than just enthusiasts and academics.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#88

Post by whazor »

itunpredictable wrote: post #2

The author of this article gives a more balanced POV than mine. I think most (maybe overwhelming majority) of publicized vibe coding projects are complete technical virtue signaling.

With agentic loops, you specify what you want and it continues to do stuff until ‘it works’. Then publish. Its takes less time and attention. So projects are less thought out and less tested as well.

In the end, I think it’s not about how a project was created. But how much passion and dedication went into it. It’s just that the bar got lowered.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#89

Post by Aurornis »

bool3max wrote: post #44
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…

You're absolutely right -- that's the crux of the problem. There are no shortcuts, only future liabilities.

If you didn't catch it, this is a joke calling out the comment above it for using a couple obvious LLM-isms. The comment above may have been a joke, too. It's hard to tell any more.

Re: Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

#90

Post by hx8 »

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…

> It didn’t seem like 3D-printing ever showed sings of displacing existing ways of manufacturing at scale, did it?

There was a point of time where some people looked at 3d printers and said "Wow, imagine how great this technology will be in 20 years." There was some amount of anticipation for multi-material printers to come around and for home printers to begin replacing traditional consumer goods. Compared to crypto, vr, and ai it doesn't look like much but 3d printing did go through a hype bubble.

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