Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

I have not yet tried vibe coding but it is something I look forward to trying when I get some free time (kids growing up a little).

I assume some could use it to make for commercial sale products but when I heard of it I really just pictured it mainly for small personal projects mainly.

I have always had an interest in electronics but without going to college there was really obvious no path to get into creating small diy projects. Then years back came along Raspberry Pi. I bought one along with a big variety of different sensors and a breadboard and all the things one would need to create something. I pictures making things that would email my mom when her plants were getting dry and many other dreams with all the sensors.

But it was still overwhelming. Lots of knowledge you need before you even start so it felt hard. But eventually I set off to try something and with many hours of searching for how to code what I wanted and essentially copying code and maybe slightly altering it to my needs I did finish one project. It was basic but I was always proud of what I accomplished. I had an IR sensor that would detect if someone walked in front of it and when that happened I also had a power relay that was connected to a lamp. When motion detected the lamp would then blink SOS in Morse code and it would also send me an email saying motion detected. What a feeling when I ran it and it worked on the first try.

But that took so much time searching and trying to find the code I wanted. I see vibe coding and imagine I could do the same thing in minutes verses hours. I don't think I will ever make some project that is ever going to make me money but do imagine with vibe coding the barrier to creating some of those projects I dreamed up in my head for personal use is much closer and obtainable.

The 3D printer hype bubble wasn't as big as the current AI bubble, I'd even characterize it by enthusiasm rather than call it a hype. However, 3D printers have come a long way, they've become commoditized and affordable. More and more people jump in all the time and the maker movement continues, the niche is growing at a steay rate. I'd be curious to see how this evolves in the next 5 to 10 years.

I feel like every blog post like this marches up to a point and then abruptly stops before looking at the only thing that has improved working conditions in the US: organized labor movements.

No, shoosh.

These promotional articles get more refined: They start with the negatives and then refute them in the last paragraphs.

None of these sophisticated articles mention that you could already steal open source with the press of a button before LLMs. The theft has just been automated with what vibe coders think is plausible deniability.

> Specifically: consumption of a surplus intelligence.

Lots of powerplants to fuel the surplus.

This misses the point that AI is not just vibe coding, but the same opus 4.6 is also exceptionally good at idea generation, content generation, research etc etc.

It is not just vibe coding that is being developed, but general intellegence.

This is a damn good article, for the purpose and assistance it aims to provide. I’m curious what steps led the author to write these thoughts down.

The maker movement directly helped bring about AI. Likely every top OpenAi engineer did a blinky project with Arduino that helped them improve their general problem solving skills.

> Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

No, because too much money has been pumped into it.

The "Maker" movement and "vibe coding" have changed the way I do things. I 3D print several things a month, and now I make PC boards with KiCad, etc. It's an incremental change, but a change nonetheless

I'm hearing most of this for the first time, and it sounds ridiculous. Anyone who grows their own veg knows decentralisation is a terrible idea

right now I think there's just a backlog of things to build

from individual tinkerers and ideas guys cranking out all the projects they would have never subsidized, there's a lot of that

and with corporations I'm seeing there are lots of products that would have taken 8 quarters to do, all being compressed into one now. The flip side is that all 8 quarters wouldn't have been allowed to happen as priorities would have shifted before the product or feature roadmap was ever allowed to get that far, but instead now all of it is being built out and other iterations and directions are being done simultaenously

after all of this is shown not to be saving money, or creating much value because they're doing too much without market validation, then a more intelligent approach will occur and less vibe coding will occur

Sorry guys, but The big rollback is coming.

A mix of perspectives in here that feel inter-related. The maker movement state-side leaned more "fun or artsy" while the real maker movement you could argue was thriving in China. Another darker way of looking at it is: if the maker movement was really believed to be a way to bring manufacturing back, it was effectively cargo-culting that by focusing only on a narrow set of building blocks. Maybe it's similar to building your own PC from parts at Fry's back at the day: that felt good... and you did feel you were really making something. But you were really doing final assembly and abstracting out the complexity of building those building blocks that went into it.

Anyway I think we are seeing a scenius phase -- it's just happening everywhere all at once on a world stage. And it's exciting. As with any moment in time there's a ton of experimentation and a small number of break-out hits. Also the pace of change means there's less staying power for a break-out hit than there used to be.

But the quick break-out hit phenomenon is particularly applicable for things that are more about the attention economy and less about the boring hidden things that traditionally have been where the economy's silent toil is really centered.

All of this makes me feel the author is too close to the creative end-consumer layer e.g. "make something flashy and cool whether it's a 3d-printer in a 5th avenue dept. store window, or a new app front end" but perhaps less focused on the full depth of things that really exist around them.

This really resonates with me in that a lot of NYC's "tech" circa 2013 was 3d printing oriented, much more so than in Silicon Valley. And I wondered why? but then it was a reflection that tech in NYC then was more about marketing, story telling, and less about the depth...

Obviously you had the west coast makers, you had the burners, so I don't mean to conflate all these differnet things. But the idea that Maker Faires were really about bringing manufacturing back... I don't know I think it was more about the counterculture, about having fun. I think that's coming back to tech right now as well in a sense. Even if it's also got dystopian overtones

> 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.

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".

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 previously crippled or morbidly obese etc.).

I think there are just a ton of none-engineers who are super hyped right now that they built something/anything, but don't have any internal benchmark or calibration about what is actually "good" or "impressive" when it comes to software, since they never built anything before, with AI or otherwise.

Even roughly a year ago, I made a 3D shooting game over an evening using Claude and never bothered sharing it because it seemed like pure slop and far too easy to brag about. Now my bar for being "impressed" by software is incredibly high, knowing you can few shot almost anything imaginable in a few hours.

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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.

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