Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?

> 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 always going to be small things (and if anything big grew out of it, those would naturally transition to the more efficient manufacturing at scale).

Vibe coding, on the other hand, is competing against hand coding, and for many use cases is considerably more efficient. It’s clearly replacing a lot of hand coding.

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. There’s certainly a cost, but hardly the only one if you’re trying to be the next big startup (for that, the high cost of coding was useful — something to deter potential competitors; you’ll have to make up the difference in some other way now).

Also, software is something that already scaled really well in the way businesses need it to — code written once, whether by human or LLM, can be executed billions of times for almost nothing. Companies will be happy to have a way to press down the budget of a cost center, but the delta won’t make or break that many businesses.

As always, the people selling pick-axes during the gold rush will probably do the best.

> 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 dirty. There are no shortcuts, only future liabilities.

Did the maker movement end? I dont think so, its just as niche as its always been. We have plenty of maker type posts on here. I dont think “vibe” coding is going away. Especially with so many open source models you can run on a simple Mac.

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.

Ok, i just generally disagree with the premise. Why does it have to be "100% vibe coded" or "0% vibe coded"? There is a very happy medium that is getting ignored here. As a coder with various language experiences, i can just get like a good kick and a template with Claude and continue in any language i want and have the LLM do the redundant parts. As someone with some soldering experience, i could have an LLM cook up and explain a circuit that might have taken me months trying to mangle myself. I think LLMs empower creativity more than ever, and creative people can have a wonderful time with LLMs softening the initial headbanging and tedious redundancies of any project.

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.

I disagree with too much philosophizing around both Makers and vibe coding. The actual incentives are curiosity and a desire to build what one cannot buy (and using that for teaching initiative in kids) - not AGI or transforming society.

Physical making is hard: you run up against the limits of plastic or the difficulty of cnc planning for various materials, as well as the limited value for small projects: people rarely make entire projects, instead making parts. So there is an upper bound for the utility of making. (btw, anyone have a laser welder or steel-capable CNC's they're tired of?)

Software making is what you make it, subject to the laws of complexity, and as valuable as its integration (computers, robotics). These in theory are limiting, but in practice there are effectively an infinite supply of valuable projects when the cost of production reduces. Deployments will be limited by access to customers, which is not a problem when people make software for themselves.

The maker movement comparison is interesting but I think it breaks down in one key way: the marginal cost of software distribution is basically zero. 3D printing still requires physical materials and shipping. Vibe coded apps can reach users instantly if there's a discovery mechanism.

The real parallel might be the early web era where anyone could make a website but finding them required Yahoo directories and later Google. Right now vibe coded apps have the same discovery problem - they exist but there's no effective way to find or evaluate them.

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.

I don't understand this. I use agentic coding to do things more quickly. And it's not just toys. I end up with software that both works and is useful. Assuming AI models powerful enough to drive that process continue to be available, why would I stop doing it?

I have a feeling that the maker movement specific being talked here was with meetups for showcasing things (fairs?) and with local hackerspaces at the age of the makerbot as the “game changer” 3D printer. If that is the case that one was captured by corporations - and for makerbot, the Stratasys “takeover”. I guess the AI/vibe coding was born from corporations but with local models there is this promise to move it to easier/more open access. I feel it’s too soon to tell to trace part of the parallels. I also feel the Maker movement cited was at a better age for Blogs, so lots of the vibe coding may just be happening without an audience.

The failure mode split nobody's naming: Claude gets regexes right about 95% of the time, which is annoying but catchable. Gets auth logic or state management right 95% of the time and you've got silent data corruption showing up 3 months later on an edge case nobody tested.

Vibe coders treating those as the same category is what actually worries me. Even in regular software there's a feedback mechanism - unit tests go red, CI breaks. Vibe coding skips that too. You get working code that passes the happy path and nothing that tells you which 5% failure rate is the dangerous one. That judgment about problem category severity is the thing that's hard to develop without breaking things first.

Participating in the maker movement achieved a few things: it signalled you had intellectual curiosity, that you were a man who could do things with his hands, and that you fixed things, rather than bought new - thereby increasing your green credentials.

Vibe coding does none of the above

I don't know about anyone else, but since vibe coding, I'm making more things than I've ever made before. Just a constant stream of making, all day.

Couldn't be happier. I make things because I want to see them exist, not because it was hard.

There was also something subtle that happened, and it seemed to happen quite rapidly, a little over a decade ago. "Maker" started being used to mean more than just 3D printing hackers and started to refer to engineers, and then others "making" things.. but the watering down wasn't the end of it, it became a way to praise a certain class of employee. The resentment that generated (say, sales, marketing, etc) and the bizarre uses of "Maker", I believe contributed to it's demise.

No. AI assisted coding ("vibe coding") will not go away, but the hype around it will as it becomes incorporated into development like any other tool. You'll be expected to use it at work (for "productivity" reasons), but if you enjoy the act of coding and problem solving, you still won't have to for personal projects.

Nah. The most universal rule of human nature is humans be lazy. Makers do extra effort for no real gain. Vibe coders do less effort for more gain. Vibe coding is what everyone wanted computers to be from the beginning. Tell it what to do, it does it.

Actually, the future isn't vibe coding, it's vibe agenting. GPT 5.3 is so advanced, you don't need to write a program to do something. You tell the agent what you want, and it does it for you by "using" desktop apps like a person. If it can't do it manually, it'll write a program to do it. That's where we're headed.

The maker movement is not dead but it's a far more niche audience. Don't get me wrong, get a 3d printer and an arduino(or arduino like equivalent), endure a week of suffering and you are hooked for life: this was my own experience and anyone that I know that has ever gone down that road. ~~vibe~~ Slop coding won't die either but there are a lot of people will get a cold shower sooner or later: some already have. All ai slop is a russian roulette where the players may not even know they are playing and the gun is a backwards revolver. I can't say whether slop coding will professionally die before or after the burst of the AI bubble, but everyone is starting to realize that slop is unmaintainable, inefficient and full of bugs when you factor in all the edge cases no slop machine will ever cover. AI can exist in non-professional spaces and hobby projects, though I'd argue it may be equally as dangerous for the people that use it and those around them: you are only one firewall-cmd away from leaking all your personal data.

As for the parallels with the maker movements, here's one example: drones are one of my hobbies. I love drones and I've built countless fpv ones. For anyone that hasn't done that, the main thing to know is that no two self-build drones are the same - custom 3d printed parts, tweaks, tons of fiddling about. The main difference is that while I am self-taught when it comes to drones, I have some decent knowledge in physics, I understand the implications of building a drone and what could go wrong: you won't see me flying any of my drones in the city - you may find me in some remote, secluded area, sure. The point is I am taking precautions to make sure that when I eventually crash my drone(not IF but WHEN), it will be in a tree 10km from anything that breathes. Slop code is something you live with and there are infinite ways to f-up. And way too many people are living in denial.

Far more people are coding and participating and creating things now than before. Doesn't matter what you call it. There is enough excitement.

The comparison feels off to me. The Maker Movement was an actual movement with a shared ideology of self-transformation through building. People identified with it. Vibe coding is just a description of a practice. The term covers a broad range of people: developers building components in languages they don't know, people trying to ship something fast and cash out, enthusiasts, and plenty of developers who are just too lazy to do their job. Any generalizations about what this "means for society" are going to be strained by definition. The author partially senses this. He writes that vibe coding "skipped the scenius phase" but misses why. I think there was no scenius phase because there was no movement in the first place. The tool just became available to everyone at once.

Vibe coding isn't so much a movement as a big fat tool that was air dropped from space after the megacorps decided to dump billions of dollars into LLMs and LLM companies.

It's like comparing Christianity to water wheels or gay pride to to the Saturn V rocket. It's just not really analogous in any way.

I do agree with the author about commoditization, however.

The most likely outcome is that software will be commoditized and software developers commoditized even harder. If we still need software engineers to prompt, you'll find plenty of people in India able to do those tasks, not necessarily with great quality until they too are replaced by better AI.

This whole situation inspired me to actually dive harder into Maker type stuff such as learning how to design PCBs, but one thing I found is that this TOO is very close to being automated by AI. To actually get hardware made, even prototyping PCBs, you NEED to go to China, and the Trump tariffs cut into the cost of doing these activities hard.

Why would it? I have a 3d printer and a laser cutter because i want to make things that few other people want.

If at all it will make me do more little hyper specific projects.

Maker movement was a great success, but in China, not in the US.

Wait - the maker movement ended?

The title of the linked article is "Vibe Coding and the Maker Movement" but the title on Hacker News is "Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?" - I think the original title should be restored.

Hard disagree with this take. Mass adoption of any technology is almost always a good thing; the more people are looking at the sane problem, the more clever/elegant/innovative solutions come out of it.

Im also not sure if “vibe coding” did not have a phase where early adopters were mucking around? I saw the early versions of gpt much earlier than chatgpt and a lot of folks were using transformers for coding before claude.

I wasn’t aware the maker movement ended. There are all sorts of cool things we can do with on-device ML that have major privacy and convenience benefits over Claude in the cloud. In fact with hardware improvements I think integrated intelligence will be heating up.

I said this with a lot less words recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47105372

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.

no it'll encourage more people to try new things

edit: I read this title wrong, thought it said "end the maker movement"

personally I enjoy creation and writing code so I'm not going to vibe code my hobby/passion project, I don't care if theoretically it'll save me x amount of time, the code is rote for me anyway but I have to be actively engaged in it to enjoy it

> Specifically: consumption of a surplus intelligence.

Lots of powerplants to fuel the surplus.

TIL the Maker movement died I guess?

> 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.

3D printing does bear some similarity to vibe coding/LLM-generated code. I do occasionally see "product" 3D printed items but the bigger value-add for 3D printing has been rapid prototyping and then running that design through actual production testing.

An example 3D workflow: Prototype design -> 3D print -> test/break -> production design -> real manufacturing process

The equivalent vibe code Vibecobe -> slop -> test/break -> real developers -> real development process

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The real test for vibe coded stuff (much like 3D printed crap at craft fairs) will be if someone actually buys it. But much like those 'makers', vibe coders will have to go through the "real development process" if they want to make money at scale.

If you're vibecoding the start of the singularity... then may be yes.

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.

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.

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

Sorry guys, but The big rollback is coming.

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

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.

The maker movement comparison cuts both ways. What killed most Arduino projects wasn't skill gaps -- it was the cost of production at scale. The LED blinks fine; shipping 10k units breaks you. That constraint forced real learning.

Vibe coding skips that floor entirely. Software "just works" until it doesn't, and the failure mode is invisible until it's customer-facing. Hardware at least tells you when something is wrong because it sparks or stops blinking.

That said: the maker movement didn't die. It got serious -- RISC-V, open silicon, edge inference. The people who started with Arduinos are now doing real work.

My bet is vibe coding has the same trajectory. The floor failure will just be more catastrophic when it comes, because software doesn't spark.